🎆 Crenshaw Departs SEC, Ownera & LayerZero, NYU Accepts Crypto Donations via BitGo, and More

Summary and Key Takeaways

1. SEC Commissioner Caroline Crenshaw Departs

2026 is off to an interesting shift at the SEC with Commissioner Caroline Crenshaw departing on January 2nd. As one of the commissioners pushing back on more lenient crypto regulation, her leaving the SEC tells the market to expect further progress in pro-crypto initiatives. This news certainly could have given crypto markets some momentum. Bitcoin has been rising since New Year’s and keeps rallying from its January 1st 9-month low of around $88K, now priced at $93,882 at the time of writing. Eyes will be on the SEC and regulatory developments like the CLARITY and PARITY Acts, if any further No-Action Letters are given, how the 5 new trust charter banks evolve, and of course all the new applications and adoption from both retail and institutions. 

2. Ownera Partners with LayerZero for Institutional Digital Asset Platform Interoperability

Ownera has been around for quite some time, building infrastructure for institutions to more easily participate in the onchain economy. As we all know, this is a multi-chain world and issuers need to be able to efficiently manage use cases for their tokens. Imagine at a flip of some toggles you can quickly deploy your token as well as applications for subscription, trading, collateral, repo, data, lending, payments, and custody across 160+ chains. Ownera chose LayerZero to help power that interoperability. It’s not just the token that needs to move, it’s the applications that need to talk to each other and reduce the need for a bunch of bi-lateral integrations (complexities) for institutions to adopt tokenization at scale.

3. NYU Langone Health Chooses BitGo for Digital Asset Donation Infrastructure

It’s always great to see useful examples of digital assets in the world in addition to those of capital markets and this week we saw NYU Langone Health expanding their donor base with it. While dollars are always appreciated, some donors may prefer to donate crypto and this academic institution chose BitGo Bank & Trust to power it. The goal is to make it a seamless experience for both sides with the donor sending, for example, bitcoin and BitGo selling it for USD to send to NYU. That said, naturally the recipient may choose to liquidate only some of the crypto, keeping the rest for potential appreciation in which case BitGo will be custodying it. This was great to wake up to this morning and brings curiosity on other use cases non-finance companies will adopt this year related to crypto and tokenization.

This is not financial advice.

RWA Foundation & WALLY DAO Updates

Join Ray Buckton, your host of The RWA Pod, for his latest interview with Mu Digital Co-Founder, Patrick Hizon!

Think Like Herwig

Hello readers,

As you prepare your first half of the year, many are already planning which key events they should plan to attend. Digital Asset Summit in NYC tends to have a strong institutional and crypto presence but can be a bit of a zoo. The perfect gathering of finance and blockchain folks all in one room where you can still breathe? TokenizeThis of course! We’re back again this year on June 23-25th in the same location, the Glasshouse in NYC. 

We’re already in discussions with many of our previous sponsors and are proud to say we have one of the largest banks in the country already supporting. Just the beginning as we put together the industry’s BEST global tokenization conference. More details TBA soon, stay tuned!

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

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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)