Web3 market intelligence firm Santiment recently revealed these two topics have outperformed other industry sub-sectors like DeFi and NFTs. The increasing concentration of RWA and real-world asset keyword hits is an encouraging data point for tokenization enthusiasts everywhere.

Source: Santiment

Seeing a trend is good – data-backed trend analysis is much stronger. 💻

👬 On-Chain Chums

Market penetration is another solid data point, and Circle is pushing hard on that front. And they’re not going in alone – the $USDC stablecoin is going live on the Celo blockchain to amplify the network’s RWA capacity. 📣

To quote: “As a leader in driving real-world adoption of crypto, the Celo ecosystem is excited to bring more RWAs onchain through our partnership with Circle and the launch of USDC on Celo.” - Isha Vershney, Celo Foundation Head of Strategy and Innovation.

Circle and Celo aren’t the only emerging bedfellows – Pyth and Ondo have teamed up to improve pricing feeds across blockchain environments. Providing a wide range of high-fidelity DeFi data, Pyth is filling a data-focused niche similar to ChainLink. ⛓️

But while Pyth is firmly focused on DeFi data fidelity, ChainLink works with real-world entities like SWIFT and Citi – we just did a write-up on their Cross-Chain Communication Protocol that you need to check out to have a firm grasp on tokenization plumbing. 📋

Source: ChainLink

🏢 Corporate Tokenization Moves

On-chain partnerships and data deep dives lead the world of blockchain. 🤖

Offline, things are more real-world and analog, often requiring papers pushed and formal approvals. 🖇️

Elwood Technologies, a digital asset firm backed by TradFi giants like Citi and Goldman Sachs, recently received its formal approval from UK regulators for the trading of security tokens and derivatives. ✅

After raising $70m in its Series A in 2022, Elwood is positioning itself as a leading regulated digital asset exchange.

Meanwhile, PayPal filled $6.5m of Mesh’s closed $22 million round from 2023. Mesh is an aggregation entity offering seamless investment, trading, and payments for digital assets, and PayPal’s investment was notably made mostly in its PYUSD stablecoin. 💸

Some entities are raising, some are investing, and some are out of here. 👋

Partior, the Singapore-based venture backed by TradFi majors like JP Morgan, has seen its CEO Jason Thompson depart the company. With over a decade of payment services experience, Thompson is well-qualified to head these types of operations.

It’s important to note that a CEO’s departure doesn’t necessarily indicate troubled waters – different swells require different captains… unless the water is swelling inside the ship. 🌊🧐

👻 “Axis of Evil” vs…

Just saying the term can make you feel like a Justice League member. 🦸

Unfortunately, the phrase has evolved into a geopolitical grab-bag of “anybody the US + allies can’t easily bully” while also including some genuinely not-very-good-at-all State actors…

Yeah… it’s complex. 🤷

Russia falls within this category and is aiming to support a CBDC launch in the country directly via helplines for end consumers. ☎️

While Russia is billing the CBDC as voluntary, the absence of privacy discussions and murmurs of pension payouts occurring solely in digital rubles has many folks feeling uncertain. 🙈

Meanwhile Iran, one of the newest aspiring members of BRICs, is pushing for a common CBDC among member nations. The idea is to align the economies of sanctioned and disaffected countries outside the SWIFT financial system more closely, the latter of which is currently responsible for around 90% of global financial volume. 🌬️

A common CBDC could help modularize economic activity between member nations. However, to call the concept challenging would be an understatement – China accounts for nearly 60% of BRIC’s economic punch, and the young, diverse economies of member nations make the group, in the aggregate, particularly vulnerable to exogenous financial aberrations. 🏔️

A fancy way of saying, “Doomed to fail – too many moving parts!” 👆⚙️

🤦 Allies of Incompetence

But it would be hypocritical to shame entities aspiring towards tokenization. While some BRIC nations may need to reexamine their commitments to privacy and transparency, at least they’re trying. Can the same be said for a lot of Western bureaucracies? 📜

Just take the United States, home to the supermajority of tokenized public debt… that its citizens cannot legally touch. 😅

The problem? The licenses don’t fit. We’ll need at least a year and a few billion dollars to address these outstanding issues… that we created. 🙃

That’s correct – the United States is protecting its citizens from easy-access, risk-free returns from debt that it issues based on taxes it collects from the citizens it is protecting. 😑

Something will give eventually in the Land-O-The-Free – if not, 2050 will look a lot like a capital-intensive daycare on a national scale rather than a country as we know it. 🧷

But… could there be a deeper rationale behind this seeming hesitation? 🧠

Copenhagen Economics released a report last year showing that a tokenized Euro could result in over €739 billion in deposit outflows for banks, resulting in higher borrowing costs and potentially sparking a deep recession. 📉

Averting a potential collapse is a good reason to exercise caution, and… wait, let’s think about this. 🤯

If the only thing keeping your financial system stable is the general inability of retail customers to easily move their money… that means eventually something will… 😬

We’ll put a pin in it here.

…

Got a bit spicy there at the end, huh? 🌶️

Things happen slowly at first, then all at once. ⚡

We’re thinking about the short-, mid-, and long-term of tokenization at RWA World. 🌐

And we’re making waves in the industry. 🌊