🚗 Aave's Horizon for Institutional RWA Borrowing, OCBC's $1B Offering, Toyota, & More

Summary and Key Takeaways

1. Aave's Horizon Powers Institutional DeFi RWA Lending

We’ve seen multiple vaults for borrowing/lending like those and leverage looping, with RealT’s properties being one of the earliest use case examples. It only iterates from here and Aave has launched an instance just for RWAs on their platform called Horizon, specifically to support institutional borrowing against their tokenized RWAs such as Superstate’s USCC and Centrifuge’s JAAA as a couple examples. Securitize took it a step further and integrated it into their platform, making it easier for their institutional customers to interact with the vault and see their real-time balances, yield accrual, and other functions. Of course this means that Horizon also supports assets on Securitize, VanEck’s VBILL being shared on social media. 

Is this interesting to you? Wish you could participate in this? Good news, only half is permissioned (the borrowing part)! Aave’s Horizon is meant to leverage DeFi liquidity, therefore anyone can supply (lend) stablecoins permissionlessly into the pools, starting with Circle’s USDC, Ripple’s RLUSD, and of course Aave’s GHO. None of this is financial advice, please do your own research. On that note, what’s the next DeFi use case for RWAs?

2. OCBC Issues $1B in Commercial Paper on JPMorgan’s Kinexys, State Street First 3rd-Party Custodian

STM.co has been tracking institutional debt as best as possible for years and overall they’ve been mostly around low-to-mid 10s of millions or jump to low-to-mid hundreds of millions (Click “Debt” on “Primary Markets” tab). Of course there are outliers but a $1B issuance from OCBC has spun some heads around, joining the ranks of Deutsche Borse and KfW Bank. The Singaporean bank chose JPM’s Kinexys Digital Debt Service to issue this on, which the City of Quincy used last year to raise $10M. Adding to the announcement, State Street is now Kinexys’ first 3rd-party custodian, reaffirming their commitment with a $100M investment in the offering. Commercial paper is short-term debt, meaning it has even less time to be stuck being cleared over multiple days. Tokenization is making that so much faster on both the asset and the payment, with JPM specifically using their new tokenized deposit token, JPMD, to help this transaction settle within minutes according to this article. This is a symptom of the bullish attitude around RWA tokenization we’ve been seeing and we expect issuances to only get bigger moving forward. As institutions get used to the technology they’ll become more comfortable with it, go up the risk curve, and issue in larger quantities & sizes (existing and new assets/funds).

3. Republic Invests in Centrifuge

Republic opened up their checkbook again for RWA infrastructure! First they acquired INX and now they’re investing into Centrifuge. This reflects where tokenization is going: building ecosystems. Tokenization started with simply hosting a primary issuance onchain, followed by trading of that asset, and now we’re seeing vaults/DeFi start to be implemented more. What’s next? Onchain ETFs, portfolio construction, and more. Republic Digital’s Opportunistic Digital Assets Fund investing into Centrifuge is a strong show of confidence in their fund management, deRWA for DeFi, and lately their partnership with S&P Dow Jones Indices. Combine all of this with Republic’s large investor pool and you have a more active, seamless user (investor) experience. So this raises the question, what could this future offering look like? Let your mind run wild and let us know on X!

4. U.S. Department of Commerce Posts Economic Data Onchain via Chainlink

From GDP to PCE Price Index, Chainlink is working directly with the U.S. Department of Commerce to publish economic data onchain, making it immutable and more importantly, accessible on multiple chains starting with 10 of them. Why does this matter? Why do we care? For the same reason we care about having stock prices onchain, they allow smart contracts to reference offchain information and act on that information for the RWA. This level of data has a variety of applications so it’ll be interesting to see who uses it and what tools or new assets get created from it that change with economic trends. Some other examples they shared include inflation-linked products, perpetual futures markets, real-time prediction markets, transparent dashboards powered by immutable data, and DeFi protocol risk management among others. Get ready for an exciting rest of the year!

5. Tokenized Vehicles: MANTRA’s First Offering (Pyse’s E-Bikes) and Toyota Blockchain Lab

You can tokenize just about anything (doesn’t mean you should) and vehicles definitely are not out of the question. In addition to putting the car’s title onchain like the California DMV did on Avalanche, vehicles can also have revenue that can be tokenized as a security. This is what Pyse is doing with their e-bike fleet on MANTRA as the first offering on their chain, tokenizing their operational leases to UAE and India-based food and ecommerce companies. 

On a similar but different application, Toyota Blockchain Lab chose Avalanche to build their own instance of the blockchain (Avalanche refers to them as L1s, previously known as Subnets). Who would run nodes for this? Toyota’s Mobility Orchestration Network (MON) would be tapping a network of manufacturers, owners, insurers, operators, and regulators. This is all in an effort to securitize fleets of vehicles and embed them in structured portfolios, similar to Pyse and MANTRA. However to make that happen there needs to be trust in the underlying assets. This is no different than natively tokenizing a company's stock vs. creating a mirror. That’s what Toyota is looking to solve, accounting for multiple pieces from insurance to maintenance records and more. What does this build? Trust and additional utility.

This is not financial advice.

RWA Foundation & WALLY DAO

The RWA Foundation introduced the RWA Pod yesterday as “A permissionless way for anyone to support RWAs using crypto with multiple RWA project tokens as yield.”

What if anyone with access to crypto could get in on the success of RWAs? Launching on September 15th, the RWA Pod enables users to stake crypto in order to earn RWA project tokens as yield. In partnership with PERQ, the RWA Pod will remain open for 90 days allowing users to deposit ETH, USDC (on Base), ARB, and S/ Sonic. Participants will receive tokens on multiple blockchain protocols related to RWA projects that the RWA Foundation has qualified and selected as Founding Members.

The yield from crypto staking is sent from the RWA Pod to the RWA Foundation in order to be converted into RWAs. These RWAs will seed a designated treasury designed to launch WALLY, the native token of the WALLY DAO by the RWA Foundation.

There are more details so make sure to read the full announcement, set your reminders, tell your friends, and get ready for The RWA Pod launching on September 15th!

Think Like Herwig

Hello readers,

If you’re in the USA, I hope you enjoyed a wonderful Labor Day weekend. This also marks the final sprint of the year as between now and early December mark the remaining months to get anything done. This means we can expect a busy September and October in the form of new RWA issuers and offerings, more licenses and platforms coming to market, major VC activity, and - of course - corporate launches of L1/L2s and stablecoins. 

What might be more curious is whether or not we see new legislation passed related to crypto. This will create another wave of excitement and acceleration for the market but, if delayed, could slow down momentum.

All I know is everything you’ve seen so far this year suggests the remainder of the year will be no boring picnic.

Happy tokenizing, 
Herwig “Happy” Konings
CEO, Security Token Group 

Follow me on X / LinkedIn

Companies of the Week

Company of the Week - Herwig: Horizon/ Aave
Company of the Week - Kyle: Toyota Blockchain Lab

Find out why and more every Friday live around 12pm EST on LinkedIn or X/ Twitter. Past episodes available on Youtube or your favorite podcast platform! 

Reports

RWA Tokenization: Key Trends and 2025 Market Outlook

Check out a report we contributed to: RWA Tokenization: Key Trends and 2025 Market Outlook. Led by Brickken, this report brings multiple parties together in diving into tokenization, with STM.co supporting with both data and some of the written sections.

What’s Inside?

✅ A Breakdown of Tokenization and Related Benefits
✅ Key advantages for issuers, investors, and institutions
✅ How the market is evolving and trends shaping adoption in 2025
✅ What’s next? Expert insights on regulation, DeFi integration, institutional involvement, and market growth

STM’s RWA Market Prediction for 2030

STM.co is proud to release a thorough report on our prediction on the tokenized real world asset market growth. This report explores the variety of opportunities within each asset class to capture value on-chain.

Tokenization can be applied to just about any object and asset type. Art, carbon credits, life insurance, and other sub $5 trillion asset classes weren’t even considered in estimates.

In order for STM to derive its 2030 market predictions, the following asset classes were evaluated: currency, M2/M3, real estate, commodities, public equities, private companies and funds, bonds, credit and lending markets.

This is not financial or investment advice.

Helpful Resources

• $30 Trillion by 2030 - STM

• Global Tokenized Real Estate Market Guide 2024 - STM

• TokenizeThis 2024: Highlights and Key Takeaways - STM

• TokenizeThis 2023: Highlights and Key Takeaways - STM

• State of Security Tokens 2023 - Q4 - STA

• State of Security Tokens 2023 - Q3 - STA

• State of Security Tokens 2023 - Q2 - STA

• State of Security Tokens 2023 - Q1 Extended - STA

• Real-World Asset Tokenization 2023 According to STM - STM

• Tokenizing an Asset in 3 Easy Steps - Security Token Show

• Rich Data in Private Assets - STM

• State of Security Tokens 2022 - STA

• State of Security Tokens 2023 - Institutional Edition - STA

• Tokenization for Institutions - What You Need to Know - STM, Arca (YouTube)