Tokenizing Everything: How RWAs are Redefining Traditional Finance at KBW2025

Hello everyone. Um yes, we're going to be discussing asset tokenization. Today, the hot crypto buzzword that everyone is talking about. Um first of all, we're just going to go across the the row and introduce ourselves. My name is Kieran.

I'm a journalist at Coin Telegraph. We'll start with you, Andrew. Everybody, my name is Andrew Durgee. I'm co-CEO of Republic. Hey guys, my name is Teddy.

I'm the co-founder of Plume. And then my name is Aya, and I'm the co-founder of Upshift, an on-chain uh yield and vault platform. Thank you very much. And I think we're going to go straight into it. Um how do we all see tokenization impacting traditional financial markets over the next 3 to 5 years?

Start with you, Aya. Yeah, so uh it's been pretty interesting because the I know the last panel talked about incumbents. We've seen a number of them uh come in after the success of BlackRock's BUIDL. Uh and really the main, you know, purpose that they're looking for is one, how do we create cheaper operational backends, uh which you know, digital asset infrastructure can definitely do. And then the second is also uh cheaper on-chain capital.

And so what we've seen is actually an influx of these incumbents come on-chain in order to tokenize different, you know, assets and asset issuers um in order to get, you know, additional cheap credit markets um that are also 24/7 readily available. Uh and so we, you know, expect to continue to see that happen at scale. Um and also they expand into net new markets and new users. Um you know, obviously quite a few of that's happening on Plume as well. Yeah, I mean I think from our side, it's pretty interesting.

Um I feel like a lot of the folks we work with, like on the more institutional front, I think initially it was, you know, how do I save money on overhead costs? But now it's how do I actually make more money? Like I feel like these institutional partners are now on Plume to actually really make money and utilize their assets in a different way. Like, you know, recently we just announced um Acred, um one of our investors, Apollo. They just deployed their private credit fund on the Plume and I think their whole story is, you know, how do I actually take this asset, collateralize it on one of our lending protocols on Plume and really borrow against it and then use this money elsewhere.

So, just for the audience as well, can you just give a bit of background into how Plume relates to asset tokenization as well, the work you guys are doing? Yeah, of course. So, on a very high level, what we're building is an open blockchain, uh permissionless blockchain focused on tokenizing real-world assets with DeFi at the core. I would say there's kind of three things we're really focused on. One is infrastructure, two is distribution, and three is composability.

So, on the infrastructure side, we've built all these different toolings uh to bring anything on chain, whether it's like asset-backed data sets, physical assets. And I think the biggest question we typically get is when the assets are on Plume, how do you actually find them real users? I think the biggest issue in real-world assets is that there's no users, really. There's no true demand. So, what we've done differently is built an entire ecosystem centered around this where we can actually find true demand by integrating with different exchanges, different custodians.

You know, we work with some folks in Asia that don't even speak a word of English, but they're now pivoting towards RWAs and they want to do this in a very DeFi native manner. So, kind of like the third point I want to talk about um of what we're building at Plume is really making RWAs feel more like crypto and less like TradFi products. And I think that's kind of how we've seen so much success on the go-to-market side, you know, and right now we're the number one chain by real-world asset wallet holders. I think the space only has 390K holders, 200,000 of them are on Plume. Um and the way we've been able to do that was by, you know, creating these different products where they can actually, you know, for example, buy an asset, collateralize it somewhere else, and then start doing these looping strategies.

Amazing. And how about yourself, Andrew? How do you see it impacting financial markets in the next few years? When you look at the traditional markets, it's really three main pieces that they're looking at. Speed, price, scale.

And when speed metrics, price metrics, and and scaling became real optionalities as it relates to to digital assets, that's when you started to see the traditional businesses really start to move in. You mix that with the fact the regulatory frameworks, particularly in the US, are extremely more favorable than they were in the past. And that's what really kind of creates this nexus now of change. And it's everybody. Every major institution now has some type of blockchain team or digital asset team.

Every major bank. And you know, as we've seen that transition now over time, it's gone from being maybe something that was a trend to now the reality. And so we're going to start to see that impact across not only traditional financial institutions, but you're going to see that moving from institutions into QPs, into accredited, into retail, and down the entire stack. Cool. Um, I I will go back to you as well with August.

First of all, did you want to give a bit of a background into the relationship there with asset tokenization? And I guess as well the low-hanging fruits of what assets will be tokenized in the next few years, too. Yeah, sure. So, on the August side, that's our on-chain prime business. So, think of a composable and capital-efficient way to do trading, borrowing, lending, and execution all in one place.

And for Upshift, we've been able to take the infrastructure we built on the August side for institutions and expand it to a more a far broader reach of users on the retail side. And really what's happened is almost a vaultification, if you will, where, you know, people have been able to find different esoteric strategies, tokenize them, and make them composable across ecosystems, across chains, across C 5 D 5, and make it capital efficient. So, you know, for us predominantly what's been very interesting is initially you had asset issuers who were pushing a lot of the tokenization narratives. Now you're having, you know, anywhere between crypto funds both on liquid and even seeing some larger lockups on venture tokenize, you know, their strategies and make it accessible to folks who maybe wouldn't be able to get access to those underlying strategies themselves. And then we're seeing the composability wheel.

And this is really important because, you know, we historically if you were just depending on, you know, C 5 lending markets or OTC lending markets, you really just wouldn't be able to find that unlock for specific strategies that are bundled in the way that tokenization enables. And so what we've been able to see is, you know, we've seen funds who deposit, call it $20 million into a basket of strategies, they tokenize it, they make it composable, and they're able to leverage loop that with, you know, risk mitigations in order to turn that into $80 million. And that, you know, allows them to raise capital in, you know, existing markets today. And it really shows that something's durable at scale. And so we've seen a lot of instances where now these larger asset issuers have said, "Okay, this looks really interesting and we can make money here.

There's clear money and new markets that we can enter. How do we also, you know, deploy that flywheel?" And so that's where we've played a pretty large part. Amazing. I guess beyond efficiency and liquidity, I mean, what new business models become possible when assets are tokenized?

Yeah, I think you're starting to see new asset classes that become accessible to people that never been able to touch them before. And uh for us obviously at Republic, tokenization and a lot of these retail oriented assets are a huge priority. Whether we're tokenizing film, music, sports. We recently tokenized shares in SpaceX and OpenAI that allow retail to be able to participate um into the into this asset class that they they haven't before. And and you know, that how what how that's represented and how that's looked at is all different.

These are really exposure to an asset class more so than anything else. Um and as we break down that barrier, you're looking at the monetization of these assets that before have been looked at very very differently. Absolutely. And yeah, I think um accessibility is a pretty big piece. Like, you know, I think when people think of art of base, they only think of like treasuries or private credit, but there's like a whole other spectrum

funny cuz I go the total opposite direction. No, exactly. [laughter] I and I think it's, you know, partly because of what you guys are doing is like very innovative. I like, you know, I think our teams have spoken before about tokenizing different types of assets. And like on Plume, you know, we have almost like a marketplace of all these different types of basket of goods and assets.

And you know, we're seeing people tokenizing GPUs as well as solar panels. We even have some folks tokenizing a durian farm in Southeast Asia all the way to, you know, camel farms in in Dubai. So, it gets it gets pretty crazy, I think. But, you know, I think that the nice thing is, you know, being able to actually access these markets. Like, there was this asset we took on chain um called Mineral Vaults.

It's basically we tokenized mineral interests in in Texas. And I think um for this private equity fund, I think they only had around like 800,000 people buying these in like I think it was like over the span of like 10 years. Ever since they deployed on Plume within like 3 months of our mainnet being live, there's around like 80,000 holders in this specific asset. So, like we're really kind of democratizing access to all these different assets. And I think that's the beauty of tokenization.

Well, and I think, you know, to kind of ramp up the conversation, um I'd love to hear from all three of you on the main technical challenges that I guess are preventing the wider adoption of asset tokenization right now. I think the largest the largest issue which is is being solved and and I mean just to to plug our Republic, I mean we're one of the ones that have solved it is in the past if you wanted to touch a lot of real world assets, you'd have to work with a lot of different vendors, right? You'd have to work with a tokenization company, you'd have to work with a primary issuance company, you'd have to work with a wallet company, you'd have to work with a custodian, you'd have to work with a transfer agent, you'd have to work with a secondary market, and you'd have to pass KYC or KYB every time, right? So, that became very very very difficult. Uh so, now you've started to see a lot of those environments start to collapse.

So, we collapsed at Republic, we collapsed that entire stack where you just need one account at Republic and you can access all those things. Actually very similar to maybe what like Morgan Stanley or Fidelity did with primary brokerage, right? So, if that becomes a lot less friction forward in order to be able to participate in those types of assets. Um and there's will be they'll see a lot more people going in this direction because it's just been such a gating item uh for both individuals and businesses. Yeah, I mean I think I agree.

I think um kind of like I when I remember when we started Plume, there were folks that were saying that, you know, it would take like anywhere between like 6 or 12 months to bring like specific assets on chain and kind of like what Andrew was saying like at Plume what we've done is also kind of like almost automated that stack and made it very make it very easy for anyone to kind of come in, look at the different modular compliance pieces. Like for example, like you know, at Plume even though we're a permissionless chain, we have AML at the sequencer level, have KYC at the protocol level. Our main product uh Nest, uh we can do, you know, white list, black list thing, freeze and seize capabilities. So, um our general counsel actually came from the SEC, so he's been very, you know, on top of the compliance stack for us and I think having a chain that can kind of have access to the broader distribution um while also meaning maintaining compliance at a certain level has been um, you know, a pretty differentiating factor for for us to work with other partners. Amazing.

And how about yourself, I am? Yeah, I would say, um, you know, very similar to to what you both mentioned. There are kind of two categories for us. The first is, um, really uh, looking at the stack around execution. So, today we're integrated into 22 blockchains.

Uh, we underwrite over 350 assets, and we're integrated into over 75 protocols. And so, you know, today if you're running DeFi strategies, it's very much a full-time job, and it requires a team of people who can look at, you know, different chains, different protocols, different point farming, you know, strategies, and um, yield farming strategies. And for us, you know, what we've noticed is even on the institutional side, someone may be, you know, exceptional at Solana, but doesn't have the bandwidth for EVM, or vice versa. And so, you know, being able to combine that stack in one place, and then making it composable. And composability is the second piece, because I think, you know, people will talk about tokenization all the time, but then they don't talk about what happens once you hold the asset.

And a lot of times, a number of these assets, you know, are not necessarily composable with the broader market, which I think Plume is addressing in a really great way. Um, and then, you know, if you look at even the Republic ecosystem, uh, you can do quite a bit with the assets once they're tokenized. But more broadly, you know, if you have an asset that maybe has a six-month lockup, or liquidity only, you know, call it once every 30 days, what, you know, what do you do with the asset other than holding the underlying equity? And so, for us, you know, a lot of the flywheel that we look at is the composability side. It's building short-term repo for some of these, you know, more illiquid, um, products.

And, you know, finding ways to make it, uh, again, taking a a non-24/7 trading asset into a 24/7 trading world. Yeah, thank you so much. I think it's a, you know, really insightful, uh, comments from all three executives here. So, how about a round of applause for all three, uh, panelists on asset tokenization. Thanks very much.

Wow, that was a fantastic discussion just like our moderator had