Written by James Bourne

Momentum around real-world asset (RWA) tokenization is growing significantly.

According to the most recent data from rwa.xyz, the total value of tokenized RWAs on public blockchains has hit $20.6 billion (£15.5bn), a 35% increase year on year.  Boston Consulting Group, who forecasts up to $16 trillion in tokenised assets by 2030, said in a recent report alongside Ripple that now was the time for institutions to act ‘before the pace is set entirely by early movers.’

The report notes how the market and adoption is set to grow ‘exponentially’ through a cycle of increasing corporate involvement and process innovation. Financial institutions and B2B enterprises invest in tokenised asset offerings, bringing down costs and reducing the number of intermediaries. These benefits help expand the global client base, providing more capital for investment, which in turn bolsters the number and scale of tokenised asset offerings.

Zero Hash, a provider of infrastructure for stablecoins and crypto products, said it had powered more than $2bn in tokenised fund flows within the last four months, adding it had on-ramped more than a third (35%) of all on-chain RWAs in Q125.

“Tokenised finance is no longer theoretical,” noted Edward Woodford, CEO and founder of Zero Hash, adding that institutions are ‘deploying real capital to tokenisation’.

Take BUIDL (BlackRock USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund), the tokenized fund from the world’s largest asset manager, BlackRock, as an example. It was only 12 months ago that the fund launched, in partnership with Securitize. A year on, and the BUIDL fund exploded from $615 million to $1.87bn in just three weeks, according to figures from Leon Waidmann, head of research at Onchain Foundation. “The tokenisation wave is hitting faster than most realise,” Waidmann wrote.

Franklin Templeton was the first incumbent to launch a tokenised fund (FOBXX) on a public blockchain as far back as 2021, but has continued to iterate, including launching a similar fund in Luxembourg, as well as offer USDC stablecoin to USD conversion. Apollo Global Management, meanwhile, announced a tokenised private credit fund in January, in partnership with Securitize.

Building out a blockchain network ecosystem is key, with all three institutions’ offerings available on multiple blockchains. Solana, the challenger to Ethereum, is making waves in this space. In February, Franklin Templeton announced FOBXX had launched on Solana; BUIDL became available in March, reported Fortune, while the Apollo fund debuted on Solana among others.

Nick Ducoff heads institutional growth at the Solana Foundation. He assesses the momentum of RWA tokenisation as a long time coming. “Looking back, there’s been institutional interest in this RWA space for quite some time,” Ducoff tells Tokenize: LDN. “Folks like WisdomTree and Franklin Templeton doing some of their earliest on-chain security token issuances in [the] 2017 timeframe, and that’s when the likes of Securitize started."

“What has proven out is that, like a lot of things, it just took a bit of time for the market to fully embrace a new technology,” Ducoff adds. “That time is now, and the market is really beginning to fully embrace this idea of tokenisation of real-world assets.”

For Solana, the portents were already looking good. At the end of 2024, crypto market intelligence firm Messari gave full marks to the foundation, saying that the last quarter demonstrated Solana’s ‘resilience, scalability, and increasing adoption.’ Ducoff notes Solana still adopts a ‘day one’ mindset. “We’ve got a lot to do yet still, but I think it is becoming increasingly clear that Solana is a blockchain that has the full trust of the institutional community,” he says.

Still on the to-do list includes greater integration between RWA and DeFi (decentralised finance). Ducoff gives needing DeFi to be compliant with securities laws, among other regulations, as an example. One of the key virtues of DeFi protocols is their permissionless nature; but to engage with a particular real-world asset in a particular DeFi protocol, it needs to be permissioned.

“Right now, most of RWA is just bought and held for the yield, or the appreciation of value,” he explains. “That in and of itself is fairly interesting – democratisation of assets, self-custody, things like this are what makes that unique - but in all honesty, that’s only a small piece of the larger opportunity, which is full integration of this RWA into DeFi.

“Even the ability to KYC the lender and have these RWA[s] being used in permissioned vaults in DeFi… this is still very immature in terms of its development,” Ducoff adds. “So this is one of the things I’m really excited about because we’ve got very committed builders in this ecosystem who are very much going full speed in this direction.”

Such builders solving the problem include, on the DeFi protocol side, Drift and Kamino, both built on Solana. At a recent offsite event in New York hosted by Ducoff, the two startups were joined by financial institutions including Franklin Templeton and Apollo among others. “Everyone in the ecosystem was in that room brainstorming how to achieve this,” he says. “Everyone is going in the same direction.”

Ducoff is speaking at the Tokenize: LDN event in December, and he is looking to emphasise that it takes a village to build a tokenised universe. “We really need more and more institutions on both the buy side and the sell side to participation, to come and issue tokens and buy them,” he says. “That’s ultimately the thing that’s going to attract more issuers."

Join Nick at Tokenize: LDN 2025, taking place on 2 - 3 December at Excel London, where he will be sharing his in-depth perspectives on the evolving role of tokenization in financial markets. Drawing on his extensive industry experience, Nick will explore real-world applications, regulatory developments, and the strategic considerations for institutions embracing digital asset technologies.

To learn more and register for Tokenize: LDN 2025, visit: https://bit.ly/3S0lXj7