GM from THE RWA DESK! Your one-stop-shop for everything RWA Front-Row Intelligence, Front-line Dealflow.
Founded in May 2025, The RWA Desk exists to accelerate real-world-asset adoption by curating first-rate intelligence and convening the market’s most influential builders, issuers, and allocators. In just six months we have staged six meet-ups (NYC RWA Meetup) that drew more than 1,000 market leaders—JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, and Fidelity to Pantera, Coinbase, Plume, Aptos, etc—turning insight into deal flow. Event attendees frequently asked us to: “Put our perspectives on paper.” In response, The RWA Desk Newsletter is delivering the perspective our community has asked for—concise, data-driven analysis of how we see the RWA space progressing.
John Wang, Naeil Iqbal, Moustafa Al-Niama, Luke Xiao, & Chad Oda At RWA NYC Meet Up V
Here’s What We Got For You:
RWA Snapshot — Where Are We Headed
Insider Opinions — Ex-Head of Digital Assets at Goldman Sachs & Trad.Fi CEO
Top Stories We’re Watching — RWA Developments
Front-Line Deal Sheet — $1.7B in Select Deal Flow
Desk Chatter — Our Opinion
1. RWA Snapshot
Real‑World Assets Hit Record $25 bn as Holder Count Leaps 51 % in 30 Days
Where Can Tokenization Go?
2. Insider Opinions
Mustafa Al-Niama, Ex-Head of Digital Assets, Goldman Sachs
“The institutional wave into tokenized assets isn’t a question of if, by now institutions recognize it’s only a matter of when. And that ‘when’ arrives the moment we can answer ‘yes’ to three questions with clarity and conviction: (i.) Is the ecosystem trusted and governed by clear, enforceable regulation? (ii.) Is liquidity frictionless and scalable across jurisdictions and asset classes? (iii.) And does this new architecture deliver a step-change improvement over traditional finance - whether through speed, transparency, access, or yield?
That’s the threshold. Anything that falls short will fade, no matter how much noise it makes today. The winners will be the platforms and protocols that quietly solve for trust, liquidity, and value - and when they do, capital will follow with force.”
Alexander Szul, CEO, Trad.fi
While private credit has undergone a rapid and much-anticipated expansion over the past decade, we have not seen a concomitant rise in technological sophistication until recently. The explosive growth of on-chain private credit reflects a shift in perspective among Web3 originators: “Tokenization is for our own benefit.”
Despite early interest from traditional finance incumbents, the tokenization of credit is being driven primarily by capital providers and Web3 native innovators. Established intermediaries lack both the mandate and the incentive to lead this transition. As a result, we are seeing Web3 enter institutional finance not only through incumbent endorsement, but by delivering capital solutions that bypass legacy preferences. This removes the long-held assumption that institutional adoption must be routed through traditional channels.
—Alex recently raised Crucible Capital & Circle Ventures.
3. Top Stories We’re Watching
Robinhood: Up 13% ($4 bn Since Launching Tokenized Stocks)
Robinhood is putting tokenized equities on the map for EU investors. In early July they minted 200+ tokenized versions of U.S. stocks and ETFs on Arbitrum, trading 24 hours a day, five days a week. The benefits are clear: 24/5 settlement, self-custody, enhanced liquidity, and zero commissions. Critics counter that these instruments may grant price exposure, but not shareholder rights—a point stressed by SEC commissioner Hester Peirce and reinforced when OpenAI publicly disavowed an “OpenAI” token it says confers no ownership.
“We delivered strong Q2 results, and launched tokenization, the biggest innovation our industry has seen in a decade.” — Vlad Tenev, Robinhood’s CEO
Citi: Tokenizing Private Market Assets via SDX
A new player has entered the RWA game—Citi Bank just announced a partnership with SIX Digital Exchange (SDX) to serve as their custodian and tokenization agent of the Swiss FINMA-supervised exchange. SDX’s goal is to convert shares of late-stage/pre-IPO companies into tokens to create liquidity for issuers while opening a new, compliant on-ramp for institutional purchasers seeking private-equity exposure. The service targets to go live in Q3 2025, promising near-instant settlement and cap table transparency for both parties.
Avalanche: Welcomes Grove Finance RWA Deployment
Grove Finance—a credit engine incubated inside Sky’s MakerDAO offshoot—has chosen Avalanche as its settlement rail, pledging up to $250 million of tokenized real-world assets at launch. Working with Centrifuge, Grove will pump capital straight into two Janus Henderson vehicles—JAAA (investment grade CLOs) and JTRSY (short-term Treasuries)—bringing the $370 bn asset manager on-chain and showcasing how programmable credit can ride low-latency L1 infrastructure. Grove’s team—veterans of Deloitte, Citi, and BlockTower—calls Avalanche “the only chain that can run a CLO book at internet speed.” Ava Labs frames the partnership as proof that complex credit strategies can live entirely on-chain. If the deployment succeeds, it won’t just swell Avalanche’s headline TVL, it will test whether DeFi rails can handle the cadences and covenants of a trillion-dollar private-credit market with the elegance of traditional settlement—and without the paper cuts. This infusion is poised to more than double Avalanche’s RWA footprint, lifting it from around $195M to about $445M.
4. Noteworthy Transactions (July 2025)
Comp. | Date | Desc. | Size | Parties |
|---|---|---|---|---|
7/28 | Credit Issuance | $250M | Grove Financial, Janus Henderson | |
7/21 | Fund Launch | $100M | Securitize, Coinbase | |
7/17 | Merger | Undisclosed | Figure Markets | |
7/14 | Acquisition | Undisclosed | Compliance Exchange Group | |
7/14 | Acquisition | Undisclosed | Oasis Pro | |
7/7 | Capital Raise | $1.1B | Two Sigman Ventures | |
7/4 | Acquisition | Undisclosed | Strangelove | |
7/3 | Fund Launch | $250M | Pantera |
5. The RWA Desk Chatter
We’ve seen our fair deal of uninvestible assets.. Here’s the truth about RWA’s.
Everyone think’s blockchain is some liquidity blackbox. That you can just snap your fingers, make a cool website, spam socials, and people will buy your memcoin. That just doesn’t work with RWA’s. If an asset is unlikely to get placed in the real world, it likely won’t get placed when it's wrapped in a few lines of fancy code.
We’ve spoken to all sides of the industry about the primary purchaser dilemma; that is, nobody is purchasing these tokenized assets. In our view there are a few reasons for this: (i) The assets suck. (ii) Institutional purchasers don’t see value prop in on-chain assets vs off chain, especially if they are holding to maturity. (iii) Risk and compliance would rather be locked in padded rooms than begin to comprehend blockchain tech.
Let’s go down the list. (i) It’s a numbers game: if there are $25B of tokenized assets, let’s assume 98% are uninvestible, that’s still $500M of solid assets that retail and institutions should be paying attention to. Why aren’t they? (ii) Well. Why would they? Simple, buyers and sellers can access their capital quicker and can earn uncorrelated yield on their crypto portfolio. (iii) Risk and compliance are catching up, seeing that traditional underwriters, insurers, custodians, security players have already entered the space—S&P Global, Moody’s, Lloyds of London, BNY, Citi, Fidelity, etc..
Blockchains enable authenticity. That’s largely why Memecoins have succeeded, doing exactly what they claim to do, unapologetic gambling. What exactly are RWA’s? It’s the difference between pigs in a blanket and beef wellington—they’re both delicious, it’s just a matter of knowing what you’re buying.
What’s Next for THE RWA DESK?
Catch ya on the next—
THE RWA DESK
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