{"id":154745,"date":"2026-04-23T07:36:54","date_gmt":"2026-04-23T07:36:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/?p=154745"},"modified":"2026-04-23T07:36:54","modified_gmt":"2026-04-23T07:36:54","slug":"real-world-assets-are-about-to-do-what-bitcoin-did-in-2013","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/?p=154745","title":{"rendered":"Real World Assets Are About To Do What Bitcoin Did In 2013."},"content":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve been in Bitcoin since 2014. I\u2019ve watched entire cycles come and go. And right now, quietly, the most important thing happening in crypto isn\u2019t getting a tenth of the attention it deserves.<\/em><\/p>\n

Real World Assets Are About To Do What Bitcoin Did In\u00a02013.<\/p>\n

I want to tell you about the moment my whole framing\u00a0shifted.<\/p>\n

Not about crypto, I\u2019d settled that question years ago. But about Real World Assets specifically. For a long time I filed RWAs in the same mental drawer as a lot of ideas in this space: genuinely interesting technology, real vision but just not ready. Smart people building things the world hadn\u2019t caught up to\u00a0yet.<\/p>\n

Then I sat with something long enough to actually understand it.<\/p>\n

A 90 day US Treasury bill, the most boring financial instrument in existence, tokenized and fractionalized so that someone with fifty dollars could own a piece of it, earn the yield and sell their position instantly. To anyone, anywhere and at any time. No broker, no account minimum, no settlement delay and no geography restriction.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve spent twelve years believing that open, permissionless systems are better than closed ones. That belief had always felt like a bet on the future. This was the first time I saw it expressed in something so mundane, so undeniable and so obviously correct that I couldn\u2019t file it away\u00a0anymore.<\/p>\n

That was the moment. A fuc*ing\u00a0T-bill<\/p>\n

Now Let Me Tell You Why The $29 Billion Is The Punchline<\/h3>\n

\u201cI\u2019ll do that math for you. We are at less than 0.01% penetration of the addressable market.\u201d<\/p>\n

Everyone is celebrating the number. The headlines read: tokenized RWA market hits $29 billion, up 266% year over year, BlackRock is in, the IMF is in and the NYSE is building a tokenized securities platform.<\/p>\n

All of that is true. All of it is genuinely significant and all of it is also almost\u00a0nothing.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The total addressable market for the assets being tokenized (real estate, equities, bonds, commodities, private credit and infrastructure)<\/em> sits somewhere between $500 trillion and $900 trillion depending on how you measure it. The current on chain RWA market is $29\u00a0billion.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ll do that math for you. We are at less than 0.01% penetration of the addressable market.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve been in this space through multiple cycles. I know what it looks like when a technology is at the very beginning of something versus in the middle of it or near the end. The ICO boom of 2017 was a middle and end story, most of the easy money had already been made by the time the retail crowd arrived. DeFi summer in 2020 felt early right up until it\u00a0didn\u2019t.<\/p>\n

This feels different. This feels like 2013 felt for Bitcoin. Real infrastructure, genuine institutional commitment, a problem worth solving and almost no one has actually shown up\u00a0yet.<\/p>\n

The People Who Have Showed\u00a0Up<\/h3>\n

Let me be specific because specifics matter when everyone around you is speaking in\u00a0vibes.<\/p>\n

The IMF published a note in April calling tokenization a \u2018fundamental reconfiguration of financial architecture.\u2019 Not an efficiency improvement. A reconfiguration. These are not people who speak\u00a0loosely.<\/p>\n

BlackRock\u2019s BUIDL fund, tokenized short duration Treasuries, has $2.1 billion in assets under management running across eight blockchains. BlackRock manages $10 trillion. BUIDL is 0.02% of their book. That\u2019s not a bet. That\u2019s a proof of concept. The bet comes later, when the infrastructure is proven and the compliance teams have run out of reasons to say\u00a0no.<\/p>\n

The New York Stock Exchange is partnering with Securitize to build a tokenized securities platform. The Bank of England is preparing to accept tokenized assets as collateral. Mizuho and Nomura ran a proof of concept using Japanese Government Bonds as digital collateral. Canton Network, (backed by major financial institutions)<\/em> has $329 billion in assets lined up for tokenization.<\/p>\n

And then there\u2019s xStocks (Solana and Mantle):<\/em> $300 million in assets under management for 24\/7 on chain trading of US public equities and ETFs. You can trade Apple stock at 3am on a Sunday from Lagos or Lisbon or Lima with no brokerage account. Someone tokenized SpaceX pre IPO exposure\u00a0, the kind of deal that used to require being a Silicon Valley insider with a $5 million minimum\u00a0check.<\/p>\n

The IMF published a note in April calling tokenization a \u201cfundamental reconfiguration of financial architecture.\u201d Not an efficiency improvement. A RECONFIGURATION.<\/strong> These are not people who speak\u00a0loosely.<\/p>\n

What I Got Wrong For Longer Than I\u2019d Like To\u00a0Admit<\/h3>\n

Here\u2019s the mistake I made for longer than I\u2019d like to\u00a0admit.<\/p>\n

I kept thinking about RWAs as crypto eating\u00a0TradFi.<\/p>\n

I kept thinking about RWAs as crypto eating TradFi. The blockchain world reaching out and digitizing the traditional finance world, on crypto\u2019s terms, for crypto\u2019s audience.<\/p>\n

That framing is backwards. And getting it backwards made me underestimate the timeline and the\u00a0scale.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s actually happening is that TradFi is choosing to rebuild its own infrastructure on blockchain rails. Not because the crypto community convinced them. Because the efficiency gains are too large to ignore and the regulatory environment has finally shifted enough to make it\u00a0viable.<\/p>\n

The SEC and CFTC issued joint guidance in March. The Fed, OCC and FDIC confirmed technology neutral capital treatment for tokenized securities. The GENIUS Act and Clarity Act are moving through Congress. For the first time in the twelve years I\u2019ve been watching this space, the biggest financial institutions in the world and the regulatory bodies that govern them are rowing in the same direction.<\/p>\n

That has never happened before. Not for Bitcoin, not for Ethereum and not for DeFi. It is happening now, for\u00a0this.<\/p>\n

When I finally reframed it, from \u201ccrypto disrupts TradFi\u201d to \u201cTradFi rebuilds itself on open infrastructure\u201d,<\/strong> the scale of what\u2019s coming became genuinely difficult to sit\u00a0with.<\/p>\n

I have to be\u00a0Honest\u2026<\/h3>\n

I\u2019ve written about the patterns I\u2019ve seen over twelve years in this space. One of those patterns is that every compelling narrative has a shadow. RWAs have one too and I\u2019m not going to skip over\u00a0it.<\/p>\n

Right now, more than 90% of tokenized assets are sitting in what analysts are calling liquidity deserts. The assets are on chain. The infrastructure is real. But the secondary market, the ability to trade freely, at fair prices, with genuine depth\u2026barely exists.<\/p>\n

Owning a tokenized piece of a commercial real estate portfolio sounds revolutionary until you need to exit on a Thursday afternoon and find three buyers in the entire market, none of them close to your\u00a0price.<\/p>\n

Liquidity is the problem that will separate the genuine infrastructure from the well funded experiments. The projects that crack secondary market liquidity will define this cycle the way Uniswap defined DeFi. The ones that don\u2019t will become footnotes.<\/p>\n

The other thing I\u2019ll say honestly: 0.01% penetration of a $500 trillion market sounds like the beginning of everything. It\u2019s also just the beginning. Which means years of building before the payoff, a lot of projects that won\u2019t survive contact with reality, and the near certainty that the assets and platforms that end up mattering most haven\u2019t been launched\u00a0yet.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve held through twelve years of this space. I know what patience costs and what it returns. Both are\u00a0real.<\/p>\n

Where I\u2019m Putting My Attention<\/h3>\n

I\u2019m not focused on the tokenized assets themselves. I\u2019m focused on the infrastructure underneath them.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not going to tell you what to buy. I\u2019m going to tell you what I\u2019m watching, which is a different and more honest\u00a0thing.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not focused on the tokenized assets themselves. I\u2019m focused on the infrastructure underneath them.<\/p>\n

Every time this space has created real, lasting value, it wasn\u2019t in the obvious thing. It wasn\u2019t the ICO tokens in 2017, it was Ethereum, the platform they ran on. It wasn\u2019t the yield farms in 2020, it was the AMM protocols underneath them.<\/p>\n

The RWA layer is the same story. The picks and shovels are the issuance infrastructure, the oracle networks that connect on chain assets to real-world data, the compliance and KYC layers that make institutional adoption possible and the liquidity protocols that turn tokenized assets from interesting experiments into actually useful financial instruments.<\/p>\n

The projects building that infrastructure, quietly and without a lot of nois, are the ones I\u2019m spending time understanding. Not because they\u2019re exciting right now. Because I\u2019ve seen this\u00a0before.<\/p>\n

The First\u00a0Minute<\/h3>\n

I started this piece by saying we\u2019re at the very beginning. Let me be honest about what that actually\u00a0means.<\/p>\n

It means most people reading this won\u2019t act on it. The payoff is years away, not months. There will be a period where the narrative gets over hyped, a few bad actors blow things up and someone writes the obituary. There will be a scandal. There will be a crash in a corner of this market that gets extrapolated into the whole thing being fraudulent.<\/p>\n

And then it will keep building. Because the underlying logic is too strong and the institutional commitment is too deep and the regulatory environment is too supportive for a setback to reverse the direction.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve watched Bitcoin get declared dead 476 times. I\u2019ve watched every technology in this space go through the same cycle: early conviction, irrational exuberance, catastrophic crash, quiet rebuilding and mainstream adoption.<\/p>\n

RWAs are somewhere between early conviction and the beginning of the exuberance. Which means, if the pattern holds (and it usually does), <\/em>we have a window. Not a long one\u2026 bevause the institutions aren\u2019t coming. They\u2019re already here. But the rest of the market hasn\u2019t noticed\u00a0yet.<\/p>\n

I\u2019d rather be paying attention now, during the building, than trying to get in during the\u00a0noise.<\/p>\n

The $29 billion is the proof of concept. The real number hasn\u2019t been written\u00a0yet.<\/p>\n

Stay early.<\/p>\n

Found this useful? Follow <\/em>@crako_0<\/em><\/a> on X for\u00a0more.<\/em><\/p>\n

Sources<\/h4>\n

IMF Notes \u211626\/01\u200a\u2014\u200a<\/em>Tokenized Finance<\/em><\/a>, April\u00a02026<\/em>IMF Fintech Note 2025\/001\u200a\u2014\u200a<\/em>Tokenization and Financial Market Inefficiencies<\/em><\/a>, 2025<\/em>ChainCatcher\u200a\u2014\u200a<\/em>The RWA market size grew 85% year-on-year to $24B<\/em><\/a>, June\u00a02025<\/em>Mintlayer\u200a\u2014\u200a<\/em>$16\u201330 Trillion by 2030: Unlocking the RWA Opportunity<\/em><\/a>, December\u00a02025<\/em>Financial Content\u200a\u2014\u200a<\/em>BlackRock\u2019s BUIDL Fund Goes Multi-Chain<\/em><\/a>, November\u00a02025<\/em>Reuters\u200a\u2014\u200a<\/em>NYSE teams up with Securitize to develop tokenized securities platform<\/em><\/a>, March\u00a02026<\/em>Reuters\u200a\u2014\u200a<\/em>BoE is open to accepting more tokenised assets as collateral<\/em><\/a>, January\u00a02026<\/em>Ledger Insights\u200a\u2014\u200a<\/em>Bank of England to clarify tokenized collateral rules for institutional use<\/em><\/a>, January\u00a02026<\/em>Canton Network\u200a\u2014\u200a<\/em>Unlocking Collateral Mobility Through Tokenization of\u00a0RWAs<\/em><\/a>The Cryptonomist\u200a\u2014\u200a<\/em>Tokenized equities on Mantle: Bybit-Backed 24\/7 access<\/em><\/a>, November\u00a02025<\/em>Katten\u200a\u2014\u200a<\/em>The SEC and CFTC Provide Crypto Clarity<\/em><\/a>, March\u00a02026<\/em>Crypto News\u200a\u2014\u200a<\/em>SEC & CFTC issued regulatory clarity<\/em><\/a>, April\u00a02026<\/em>KuCoin\u200a\u2014\u200a<\/em>Bitcoin \u2018dying\u2019 for the 476th\u00a0time?<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Real World Assets Are About To Do What Bitcoin Did In 2013.<\/a> was originally published in Coinmonks<\/a> on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve been in Bitcoin since 2014. I\u2019ve watched entire cycles come and go. And right now, quietly, the most important thing happening in crypto isn\u2019t getting a tenth of the attention it deserves. Real World Assets Are About To Do What Bitcoin Did In\u00a02013. I want to tell you about the moment my whole framing\u00a0shifted. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":154746,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-154745","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/154745"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=154745"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/154745\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/154746"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=154745"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=154745"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=154745"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}