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🐳 Weekly Edition: We need to talk about RWAs

🐳 Weekly Edition: We need to talk about RWAs

There's a right way and a wrong way to tokenize them

Beluga & Aidan Carney Skytt
August 29, 2026

As we step into another bull market, the narratives that will carry us to the promised land are starting to emerge. The strongest one is arguably tokenization. Every other week, headlines come out about the biggest private equity firms, real estate investment trusts and even countries wanting to tokenize everything. As a crypto holder, this is extremely exciting because we are being told trillions of dollars of assets are about to sit on blockchain rails.

Not all tokenization efforts are created equal. In my view, there is a right way and a wrong way to tokenize assets. One unlocks entirely new financial markets while the other is mostly putting existing ownership structures onchain. First, why would you want to tokenize a real-world asset? The main reason major institutions are pushing so hard for this is because it creates liquidity for illiquid assets. Say BlackRock owns a railroad in Arkansas and decides they want to sell it. There are very few people who can buy a railroad in Arkansas. It may take years to find a buyer and that entire time, your capital is locked up instead of being deployed into the next undervalued asset. If BlackRock were to tokenize the railroad, they could fractionalize the economic rights and sell them to a much broader pool of potential investors. BlackRock gets liquidity and a slew of onchain buyers get exposure to Arkansas locomotive infrastructure. It’s a win-win.

Now imagine a real estate trust wants to tokenize an apartment building. They could divide ownership into thousands of tokens and let people around the world buy a small piece. That certainly improves accessibility and liquidity, but there is something misleading about calling it decentralized ownership. Thousands of people might own tokens representing the apartment, but one guy still has the master keys. Someone still has to manage the building, collect rent, fix the toilets and decide what happens to the property. Putting the ownership records onchain doesn’t suddenly make the underlying asset decentralized.

This is where I think tokenization gets much more interesting. Instead of focusing on putting the asset itself onchain, tokenize the economic rights attached to it. Take the rent from the apartment building. You could fractionalize those cash flows and distribute them among token holders. Investors could trade their exposure, borrow against it or potentially use it throughout DeFi. You could even separate different parts of the asset. One token could represent rental income, another could represent appreciation in the property and another could represent its debt. Instead of simply fractionalizing an apartment building, you are unbundling its economic characteristics and creating entirely new markets around them.

Two approaches to real-world asset tokenization

That is the real promise of tokenization. The apartment building doesn’t need to be decentralized. It probably never can be. The financial rights attached to it are what benefit from being put onchain. Blockchains are really good at moving, dividing and trading financial assets globally. They are considerably less useful at deciding who gets the master keys.

TLDR: The future of tokenization isn’t putting everything onchain. It’s putting the economic rights that actually benefit from being onchain.