⚡️ Tether, R2, Chainlink, & More Taking the RWA Industry by Storm

Summary and Key Takeaways

1. Tether to Raise Between $20-30B at Half Trillion Valuation

What’s bigger than Bank of America and would be considered the second largest bank in the world by market cap? Tether of course! The stablecoin operation with 99% less workforce than any other bank is now taking money from the usual suspects like SoftBank and Ark are the ones ballooning this valuation with much excitement. Tether is now a key part of the US administration’s push for stablecoins and, ultimately, adoption of US treasuries as a result. This new war chest would give it more cash on hand than most other large fintechs like PayPal and Stripe who are looking to compete in stablecoins. Meanwhile, Tether pushes its #1 size dominance into other currency markets and continues to innovate including in backing the recently successful Plasma Protocol for payments, which saw over 2 million transactions in the first 24 hours of launch and has over $6 billion deposited on Aave in just one week! 

2. The Banks are Teaming Up for Stablecoins and Tokenized Deposits: 9 in EU, 6 in UK

The consortiums we saw a couple of years ago when it came to different blockchains or distributed ledgers are coming back now with a focus on stablecoins and tokenized deposits. In Europe we’re seeing 9 of them, including ING and DekaBank, partner up to issue a joint stablecoin. This comes just a month or two after we saw something similar from U.S.-based banks. ING and DekaBank (See on debt section of STM.co) have both issued tokenized bonds in the past, experimenting with different ways to settle the cash leg (the payment or P in DvP) including working with central bank money. This is because the cash and asset ledgers are different systems unlike the blockchain recording both parts of the transaction (see section 4 for more on this). Having a stablecoin they can agree on will help them with truly achieving atomic settlement but the other portion to note is emphasis on compliance with MiCAR and GENIUS regulations. On a slightly different note, Barclays, HSBC, Lloyds, and 3 other banks in the UK are partnering up to pilot tokenized deposit. They’ll be working with Quant for infrastructure essentially connecting different ledgers/ legacy infrastructure. This is something we anticipate Fnality will have a hand in as well, looping in the central bank settlement part as they continue expanding thanks to their recent $136M Series C.

3. R2 Hits the Ground Running with 12 Asset Managers

What better way to close out last week than seeing someone make a statement with not 1, not 2, or even 10 but 12 asset managers linked to their platform launch. This is the mainnet launch of two vaults made for both risk-averse and more risky investors. The first one is essentially diversified exposure to tokenized treasury products like VanEck’s VBILL on Securitize or Janus Henderson’s JTRSY on Centrifuge. For those looking for higher returns (and ok with higher risk), their private credit vault allocates to strategies from Fasanara Capital, Mercado Bitcoin, and Goldfinch. Where are the rest of the rumored 12? According to their docs on “Trusted By”, Ondo Finance, Superstate, DigiFT, and Archax are listed so it’s likely they’re being onboarded. What does this mean for the vaults? Although speculation from our side, this likely means allocations from the treasuries vault to Ondo’s OUSG, UBS’s UMINT token on DigiFT, and aberdeen’s liquidity fund on Archax. Meanwhile the private credit vault will likely send inflows to Superstate’s Crypto Carry Fund and Invesco’s iSNR on DigiFT. 

Aside from the PC vault going after higher returns (~10%), they’re boosting that with rewards bringing total target yield closer to 32%! This is especially relevant for testnet participants that will get a minimum 100R2 tokens simply for participating on mainnet for a couple months. This speaks to the power of utility tokens becoming an important part of the new onchain economy, aligning users with the company’s goals and a creative way of incentivizing participation.

4. Chainlink Partners with 24 Institutions for Onchain Corporate Actions

Tokenization is about much more than just making an asset easily transferable and even the increased utility the end user gets to experience. Oftentimes the back and middle office are overlooked which are what power important functions of RWAs such as dividends, stock splits, coupon payments, and more (i.e. corporate actions). This is what Chainlink is now trying to bring onchain with 24 other institutions around the world including SWIFT, the DTCC, Euroclear and other notable names! What’s wrong with the current system? Everything. Manual data entry to re-entry is subject to human error which in the past has resulted in literally multi-trillion dollar errors. Funny enough, according to the article on this Chainlink collaboration, Citi is the one reporting “that the average corporate action touches 110,000 interactions and costs $34 million to process.” There’s also a lack of easy access to information and it’s not structured, meaning days or weeks to process, sometimes just because someone is waiting on someone else’s email response. This even applies to internal systems that don’t talk to each other. These are pilots and it will take time to bring legacy systems onchain but it will be necessary if we want RWAs, especially stocks, to truly be tokenized in the long-term. Why else do institutions care? To save on what’s currently reportedly costing them $58B per year on just corporate actions.

5. zerohash Raises $104M in Monster Funding Round Led by Morgan Stanley & Apollo

With big names like Interactive Brokers and SoFi on the cap table, zerohash’s Series D is positioning them extremely well in terms of powering institutional infrastructure. The unicorn essentially offers an easy way to access web3 using APIs. This means rather than building their own onramps/offramps, tokenization engines, and other infrastructure themselves, institutions can simply use zerohash to streamline that. Not too surprisingly, the day after this announcement came out, Morgan Stanley updated everyone that crypto trading will be coming to E-Trade in 1H2026 and of course zerohash will be streamlining their process. Crypto trading? Yes, it’s basic but it’s also just the start of what will become bringing their whole wealth management business onchain (customized onchain portfolio composition and rebalancing, seamless interaction with tokenized assets like alternatives and crypto allocations, etc). We can expect to see this continue to happen with other strategic investors and the caliber of participants using zerohash infrastructure will only motivate others to join in as well.

This is not financial advice.

RWA Foundation & WALLY DAO Updates

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

In partnership with PERQ, the RWA Pod allows you to deposit ETH, USDC, 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.

What’s the update this week? What’s the RWA Pod TVL? Hear directly from your RWA Pod Host Ray Buckton!

Interested in the interview with Julian Kwan from IXS? It’s now available on X and on YouTube, go ahead and check it out 👇!

STM.co Data

This is not financial advice.

Think Like Herwig

Hello readers,

Today is the first-ever reward payout of the RWA Pod staking vault that yields a total of 10 RWA protocol and utility tokens. I’d reckon 98% to 99% of crypto natives have less than half that even if you include Chainlink and Ripple in that category. 

That’s history in the making because this is not just staking on steroids, but it’s the first ever release of Pre-TGE WALLY tokens and it’s a whole new paradigm to help the RWA ecosystem with. You may look at the 10 tokens and not pay much attention as you likely haven’t heard of most of them. That’s by design! Half of the project rewards in the RWA Pod are Pre-TGE too.

All it takes is one of them to get noticed in a big way and now you won’t see a bunch of random RWA cryptos, you’ll see potential gains in all of them just like people saw the Solana phone and Bonk. Any one of these rewards could have Bonk level success and everyone in the RWA Pod will be massive winners.

That’s what the RWA Foundation and WALLY is all about. Making winners out of the people who believe in RWAs! Are you one of them? Go stake the RWA Pod on Perq.Finance then :)

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

Follow me on X / LinkedIn

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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)