THE RWA DESK is back with Edition 9, your one-stop shop for everything RWA. Front-Row Intelligence, Front-line Dealflow.
Opening Bell: The 2026 RWA Outlook — Featuring DTCC, FalconX, Fairmint, Canton Foundation, Aptos Labs, and hosted by Chad Oda, The RWA Desk.
Here’s What We Got For You:
RWA Market Snapshot — $24B in RWA TVL & 835k Holders
Institutional Event Recap — Opening Bell: 2026 RWA Outlook
Top Stories We’re Watching — Tether & Bitwise
Front-Line Deal Sheet — $965B in Selected Deal Flow
Desk Chatter — Compliance as a Network Effect
1. RWA Market Snapshot
RWAs Sit At $24B & Nearly 835k Holders!
2. Institutional Event Recap
Opening Bell: 2026 RWA Outlook
Last month in NYC, The RWA Desk convened with leaders including Michael Winnike of The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC), Craig Birchall, CFA of FalconX, Joris Delanoue of Fairmint and the Canton Foundation, and Ryan Zega of Aptos Labs to examine what will move RWAs from pilots to production in 2026.
How the DTCC is thinking about what “production” actually means for RWAs in 2026
Key Takeaways
Production is a balance-sheet decision.
The constraint is not whether assets can run on-chain. It is whether institutions will size into them, repeat them, and defend them internally. Recurring usage is the signal.
Issuance is solvable. Liquidity is not.
Launching tokenized products is increasingly straightforward. Redemptions, secondary liquidity, and stress behavior remain the structural bottlenecks.
The cash leg determines scale.
Without on-chain cash, repo rails, and collateral reuse, tokenized assets remain static. Financing infrastructure is where real scale emerges.
Regulated DeFi is the scalable path.
Institutions are comfortable with smart contracts. What they require is legal certainty, defined liability, and clear insolvency treatment.
Interested in partnering/sponsoring future events? Let’s talk.
RWA Desk Sponsor Highlight
FalconX is a leading digital asset prime brokerage for the world’s top institutions. The firm provides comprehensive access to global digital asset liquidity and a full range of trading and financing services.
Fairmint brings equity onchain—making it easy to issue, manage, and transfer. Founders raise seamlessly, while investors hold their equity directly in their wallets.
Mercury offers radically different banking. Unlike traditional banking that simply holds money, Mercury merges banking with software built for precision and speed to help entrepreneurs accomplish everything they want with their money. With banking, credit cards, and financial software, Mercury helps more than 200,000 ambitious companies build great things.
*Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services provided through Choice Financial Group and Column N.A., Members FDIC. The IO Card is issued by Patriot Bank, Member FDIC, pursuant to a license from Mastercard®.
Aptos' breakthrough technology, scalable infrastructure and user safeguards are designed to power the next generation of financial systems by offering unparalleled high throughput and low latency that can scale to billions of users.
3. Top Stories We’re Watching
Tether — Strategic Investments into “Freedom Tech” stack
In the past week, Tether put $100M into Anchorage Digital (federally chartered crypto bank) and $150M into Gold.com (≈12% stake), signaling a push to pair USDT with regulated custody and broader gold distribution alongside its XAUT product. Zoomed out, the firm is redeploying record profits into an expansive portfolio—energy, AI, payments, even metals—while ramping hiring, a bid to turn stablecoin cash flows into a diversified infrastructure empire.
Bitwise — on-chain yield vaults go institutional (via Morpho)
Bitwise rolled out non-custodial on-chain vaults on Morpho, with the first strategy targeting ~6% APY from over-collateralized lending pools, curated and risk-managed by Bitwise (not a deposit, yield varies). It’s a small line with big implications: an ETF-scale manager offering programmable yield products that keep investor assets in their own wallets.
4. Noteworthy Transactions (Feb 2026)
Deal | Date | Desc. | Size | Parties |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Anchorage Capital Raise | 2/5 | Anchorage expands into stablecoin flows | $100M | Anchorage & Tether |
Gold.com Capital Raise | 2/5 | Retail gold & tokenization rails build out | $150M | Gold.com & Tether |
2/5 | Kraken-backed SPAC to acquire crypto/RWA infrastructure | $345M | Kraken, Tribe Capital, Natural Capital | |
Mesh Capital Raise | 1/27 | Wallet/account aggregation for instant transfers | $75M | Dragonfly, Paradigm, Coinbase, Liberty City |
Superstate Capital Raise | 1/22 | Tokenizaed T-bill issuer scaling distribution | $82.5M | Bain Capital, Distributed Global, Haun, Galaxy |
1/21 | Custody and prime services hit the public markets | $212M | BitGo, Goldman Sachs, Citi |
5. The RWA Desk Chatter
Compliance as a Network Effect.
There is a positive feedback loop to being compliant. With every license added (transfer agent → broker-dealer → custodian → fund admin —> etc) you increase your surface area for new buyers to access your product. More venues can touch you (banks, RIA’s, exchanges, funds, treasuries, sovereigns, endowments, pensions, etc). When your product is “eligible collateral” or “approved counterparty,” your product’s flywheel speeds up.
More channels = more flow = stronger case for the next license.
Here’s a quick who’s who on the key licenses and approvals that tokenization players are using to compound distribution:
Transfer Agent (TA) — Keeps the official cap table and processes transfers/corporate actions; trusted records speed approvals, redemptions, and audits (SEC-registered).
Broker-Dealer (BD) — Can solicit/execute offerings and secondary trades with KYC/suitability, opening wealth and institutional distribution (SEC + FINRA).
Alternative Trading System (ATS) — Runs a supervised matching venue with a rulebook and surveillance, enabling compliant secondary liquidity (Reg ATS + FINRA).
Qualified Custodian / Trust — Segregates client assets with fiduciary oversight, unlocking larger mandates, margin, and collateral eligibility (OCC/state charters).
Fund Administrator — Strikes NAV and handles subs/reds/reporting, enabling daily marks, NAV loans, and scale (contracted admin; fund under SEC rules).
Investment Adviser (RIA/ERA) — Manages SMAs/funds holding tokenized assets under a fiduciary standard, creating allocatable product shelves (Form ADV).
Money Transmitter / MSB — Moves fiat for on/off-ramps and redemptions across states, completing the cash leg (state MTLs + Financial Crimes Enforcement Network MSB).
Payment / Settlement Connectivity — Plugs into wires/RTP/SWIFT so cash and asset settle together, reducing fails and enabling collateral reuse (bank partnerships/memberships).
Imagine algae growing in a pond for a month. The first 15 days look trivial because each doubling starts from the size of a penny; the next 15 feel overwhelming as the lake’s surface is entirely green. Network effects enable exponential growth—quiet, then sudden.
Catch ya on the next—
THE RWA DESK