RWA Boom: Should You be Investing in RWAs?

A word that will keep on popping up the longer you spend in crypto is ‘tokenization’.

This is the idea that anything can be replicated in the digital world and converted to a tradeable and transferable token.

In particular, the idea of the tokenization of real-world assets (RWA) is one of the enduring themes of the crypto markets in the last few years.

Real world assets include things like cash, bonds, treasuries, stocks, commodities, property, collectibles, art. Pretty much anything that holds some kind of value and the potential to be traded or transferred.

This tokenization of RWAs is not just some kind of wishful thinking from within crypto. This is something that traditional finance (TradFi) is pushing heavily and growing at a pace that suggests it is going to be the most dominant theme of crypto for at least the next decade.

But for all you might hear about tokenization of RWAs, the question remains, what does that look like in the real world?

Take a look at this:

This is data that’s showing the growth in RWAs (private credit, stocks, bonds, treasuries) over the last couple of years.

To me that’s the kind of growth that was seen in Bitcoin’s earliest days. If this trajectory continues, RWAs may become the most profitable play in crypto this cycle.

You can see the very distinct ramp up in value over the last year, and in particular since the start of 2025. That’s a massive bullish signal.

Then, we add stablecoins…

You almost can’t see the RWAs from earlier.

There’s a massive ramp up of stablecoin value, a lot of that in the 2021 boom market, and then a similar sort of trajectory from 2024 into 2025.

This tells me two things.

One, explosion in RWAs is a signal that TradFi is heavily moving into tokenisation and the crypto world. This signifies the importance of RWAs and tokenization long term.

Two, the explosion in stablecoins signal that liquidity is flooding into crypto, which is a precursor to a price boom like we saw in the 2021 cycle.

Price Booms Led by RWAs

These are metrics to keep a close eye on.

Opportunities in RWA-focused crypto projects and platforms will be a crypto investor’s moonshot dream. In 2021 it was DeFi projects like Yearn.Finance and Aave that stole the show.

Aave went from around $25 to over $500 in 2021. And Yearn went from around $790 in mid 2020 to over $80,000 by mid-2021. These are now pushing into RWA offerings. But my take is there will be Yearn and Aave-like returns in RWA plays as this next cycle gets going.

The other is that with a more crypto friendly U.S. regulatory system and a pro-crypto and clearly pro-stablecoin administration, the knock-on effect is a huge capital injection into crypto markets.

As we know, when the stablecoin holdings explode higher, capital is liquid and pumps into crypto, often the market flies higher as a result.

Watch this space!

Trust in crypto,
Adam Atlantic