The Missing Markets of Tokenization
Why the future of RWAs will be shaped not by the assets on-chain, but by the invisible systems behind them.
In every major technological shift - railways, electricity, the internet—the earliest waves of innovation centre on the obvious. Tracks are laid. Power lines are strung. Websites are built. Only later does the real value reveal itself: in the infrastructure, the standards, and the invisible machinery that allows an ecosystem to scale beyond its earliest enthusiasts.
Real-world asset (RWA) tokenization is following a familiar pattern. Billions of dollars’ worth of loans, treasuries, real estate slices, and renewable-energy receivables now appear on-chain. Financial institutions, once sceptical, increasingly speak the language of smart contracts and blockchain rails. Tokenisation is no longer a curiosity; it is, for many, an inevitability.
Yet look closely, and the market resembles something early and uneven. The assets are arriving far faster than the supporting infrastructure. In a sense, tokenised finance has built the storefront before constructing the warehouse. This gap is not a failure; it is a signal. For those who understand it, it is a map of where the most valuable businesses of the next decade will emerge.
10 Areas Where the RWA Ecosystem Must Evolve
Below, we explore ten areas where the RWA ecosystem must evolve - not mere conveniences, but market necessities that will determine whether tokenisation becomes a trillion-dollar transformation or stalls under its own weight. Each area represents not yet a product, but an economic inevitability waiting to be built.
1. A Market That Can Actually Be Understood
Traditional capital markets rest on disclosure: balance sheets, cash-flow statements, risk factors. Tokenised markets, by contrast, remain patchworks of dashboards, spreadsheets and social-media commentary. Professional investors have little patience for detective work.
The market will need to evolve toward standardised transparency - not more data, but understandable data. A single, authoritative view of each tokenised asset:
What it is
Who pays
What the risks and defaults are
How yield is computed
Whether the token truly maps to enforceable rights
Such a platform becomes not a luxury, but the minimum condition for institutional capital. The first company to solve this will not merely provide analytics; it will function as the de facto disclosure regime of the industry.
2. Yields Must Move From Marketing to Mathematics
Today’s yield dashboards often resemble pitch decks more than financial statements. APYs are modelled, optimistic or unverified.
As institutional allocators enter, the market must shift toward receipt-level transparency:
Timestamped incoming payments
Counterparty identification
Real APY calculated from cash, not promises
This is not just user experience; it is market discipline. Performance data is the foundation of asset pricing, risk modelling and capital allocation. Without it, tokenised assets remain speculative curiosities, not institutional products.
3. The Return of the Ratings Agency
Ratings agencies have many flaws, but markets without them tend to be more opaque, more volatile and more prone to mispricing.
RWAs today rely on informal assessments: influencers, newsletters, Discord reviews. If tokenisation aspires to become a global credit market, it cannot remain allergic to rigorous assessment.
A new class of rating institution will need to emerge—one fluent in both credit underwriting and on-chain forensics. Its value will lie not in cheerleading yields but in the willingness to issue sentences many issuers will not enjoy: “this should not be touched.”
Once such an institution becomes trusted, its influence will be profound. Markets, after all, price assets relative to perceived risk. Whoever defines risk defines pricing power.
4. Identity Must Become Portable
If tokenization hopes to broaden access, investors must not complete KYC ten times on ten platforms. The friction is intolerable for retail and inefficient for institutions.
The market is moving inevitably toward portable compliance identities - a single verified profile that can be used across issuers, platforms and jurisdictions.
Just as “Sign in with Google” became a web default, an “on-chain investor passport” will become a standard expectation. Whoever owns this identity layer will sit at a powerful intersection: distribution, compliance and user onboarding.
5. Liquidity Must Become Real, Not Rhetorical
RWA marketing often boasts “24/7 liquidity.” But many assets resemble private placements—easy to buy, difficult to exit. Shallow books and sporadic buyers undermine the very promise of tokenisation.
If RWAs are to become a true investable market, liquidity infrastructure must evolve in several ways:
Deeper pools backed by committed market-makers
Scheduled liquidity windows
Transparent pricing models
Execution engines tuned for real-world credit, not crypto memes
Liquidity is not merely a convenience; it is the boundary separating investment from lock-up. The firms that solve RWA liquidity will effectively set the terms of price discovery for the entire sector.
6. Servicer Data Must Connect Directly to the Chain
The performance of a loan, a property or a renewable-energy asset ultimately depends on the servicer—the party collecting payments, tracking occupancy, reporting arrears.
At present, this data lives in email chains, PDFs and proprietary databases. If RWAs are to reach institutional credibility, this gap must close.
The market will need automated data bridges that push verifiable operational data on-chain:
Rent received
Loan repayments
Delinquencies
Construction milestones
Revenue streams
This evolution is not optional: without it, tokenisation becomes a glossy layer over a fundamentally opaque system. With it, RWAs become data-rich financial objects capable of powering sophisticated analytics, dynamic pricing and programmable compliance.
7. Oracles Must Move Beyond Price Feeds
Most oracle systems today specialise in market prices. But RWAs rely on operational metrics:
Occupancy
Energy production
Seasonal revenue
Insurance events
Borrower performance
Integrating these into on-chain logic enables smarter token behaviour—automatic interest adjustments, risk triggers, covenant monitoring.
The firms that create robust, tamper-resistant real-world oracles will reshape how tokenised assets function. They will also become critical systemically, much as rating agencies and index providers did in earlier eras.
8. Insurance Must Catch Up With Innovation
Institutions do not enter markets that lack predictable downside protection. The crypto sector’s informal, community-governed insurance is insufficient for serious credit investors.
Tokenised assets require specialised insurance markets covering:
Payment defaults
Servicer failure
Misrepresentation and fraud
Legal disputes
Valuation mismatches
Done correctly, insurance brings credibility, not just protection. It signals that underwriting discipline has been applied and that risks have been priced rather than assumed.
The opportunity is large. Insurance premiums in traditional structured-credit markets often rival asset-management fees. The RWA market will prove no different.
9. Structured Finance Must Go On-Chain
Securitisation—pooling assets and slicing risk—built much of the modern credit market. Tokenisation has barely touched it.
The next stage of evolution will bring on-chain structured markets:
Pooled mortgages, SME loans, solar receivables
Senior, mezzanine and junior tranches
Programmatic cash-flow waterfalls
Real-time performance monitoring
Such tools unlock a deeper market: institutions can buy risk that suits their mandates; retail investors can access exposure previously unavailable.
The complexity is undeniable, but so is the necessity. Without structured finance, tokenisation remains a niche. With it, it becomes a capital-formation engine.
10. The Consumer Interface Must Hide the Crypto
For tokenisation to achieve mass adoption, the underlying technology must disappear from view.
Retail investors should be able to:
Buy a slice of real estate
Allocate to treasuries
Invest in solar projects
Monitor performance
Withdraw funds
without ever encountering bridges, gas settings or wallet prompts.
Every major digital shift—shopping, banking, transport - scaled only after the complexity was abstracted away. Tokenisation will be no exception.
The company that builds the first normal-person RWA app will hold extraordinary distribution power, just as PayPal and Revolut did in earlier digital-finance waves.
Why These Opportunities Matter
Individually, each of these ten market evolutions is an attractive business. Together, they form a broader narrative: RWAs are not yet a market. They are a collection of assets waiting for a market to emerge.
A functioning financial market requires:
Transparency
Price discovery
Liquidity
Identity and compliance infrastructure
Risk assessment
Insurance
Standardised data
User interfaces accessible to non-experts
These elements are not afterthoughts - they are the market.
The coming decade of tokenisation will be defined less by which asset classes appear on-chain, and more by which firms build the invisible architecture underneath. The winners will resemble Stripe, Bloomberg, Experian or BlackRock far more than they resemble today’s tokenizers.
The Inevitable Shift
Today, most attention falls on the assets. But markets do not reward the visible; they reward the indispensable. The opportunities outlined above are not optional add-ons—they are the missing institutions of a future financial system.
As tokenization grows, the industry will not simply adopt these tools; it will depend on them. And when that happens, a handful of firms will find themselves sitting at the structural choke points of global capital flows.
In retrospect, their rise will seem obvious.
Someone will build these systems. Someone will standardise them. Someone will become the infrastructure that the next trillion dollars of tokenised assets requires.
When they do, it will not be an accident. It will be the market evolving toward what it always needed.
And someone will be very, very rich.
Last updated
Was this helpful?