Price-Discovery Admissibility in Tokenized Fixed Income: Identification, Affine Characterization, and the Structure of the Token-to-Fiat Mapping
A tokenized U.S. Treasury product lives on two ledgers: an off-chain portfolio of government securities and an on-chain wrapper that claims to represent it. The foundational question is whether the on-chain series carries recoverable information about the underlying -- whether a mapping from token to fiat exists, and with what structure. We proceed in three steps. First, fixed-income measurement conventions are reconciled between the ledgers; these corrections are signed and jointly. Second, on the reconciled series we introduce a price-discovery admissibility criterion: a falsifiable test, based on serial dependence and idiosyncratic dispersion, for whether a product's series is market-informative or administratively generated. Of four products with sufficient history it admits exactly one; the rest are dominated by how net asset value is computed and republished, and treating them as spreads fits artifacts. That most of the universe is inadmissible is our principal finding. Third, for the admitted mapping we give a minimal two-factor affine characterization in which the basis enters additively and orthogonally to rates, recovering a quarterly reversion, a small positive long-run basis, and a sharp March 2026 regime change toward parity. Persistence is weakly identified; we propagate it through a profile likelihood into one consequence, a collateral haircut. The contribution is measurement and identification infrastructure for when on-chain fixed income may be treated as a quantitative object.