Digital Asset News host Rob breaks down tokenization, real-world assets, and the altcoins gaining traction with institutional investors
A solo presentation by the host of Digital Asset News examining the tokenization of real-world assets and which blockchain networks are capturing institutional volume.
Summary
The host, Rob, opens with Coinbase's strategic investment in Centrifuge as its preferred tokenization infrastructure, using this as a springboard to explore the broader tokenization landscape. He cites BlackRock CEO Larry Fink's comparison of tokenization today to the internet in 1996, and walks through the advantages and risks of putting real-world assets on-chain. Drawing on data from rwa.xyz, he identifies the blockchains capturing the most real-world asset volume — with Canton's $358 billion in total value standing out as a surprise leader — and notes that a spot Canton ETF has been filed in the US by 21 Shares at 50 basis points. He also covers a landmark pilot called Nexus, led by JP Morgan, Mastercard, and Ripple, which used Ondo Finance's tokenized US treasuries to settle cross-border transactions on the XRP Ledger for the first time outside traditional banking windows. Rob closes with MoneyGram's deal with Kraken to enable crypto-to-cash withdrawals globally, and in the Q&A reflects at length on AI infrastructure investor Leopold Aschenbrenner's outsized returns — turning $225 million into $5.5 billion via picks-and-shovels stocks — as a parallel lesson for crypto investors.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Tokenization and the Altcoins Gaining Institutional Traction
Host (Rob): Payments and now tokenization — I can kind of see which altcoins are winning and which ones are falling by the wayside. Now, that doesn't mean that your altcoin might not be awesome in weeks, months, or years to come. But looking at what's going on in tokenization and payment rails, there are some winners being made.
What I'm talking about today is a report about tokenization. First of all, what is tokenization? What does it all mean? What are some of the hindrances, what are some of the problems? We'll go over all that. But the big story — or one of the big stories — is that Coinbase is getting into yet another sector of the digital asset space. Coinbase has made a strategic investment in Centrifuge and selected Centrifuge as its preferred tokenization infrastructure, which is a pretty good idea. Centrifuge apparently brings institutional expertise, and then Coinbase brings essentially retail and also institutional relationships and developer reach — although they are 14% slower on that department after laying off staff just this week. But I digress.
That's what's going on with tokenization, and it kind of brought me down a little rabbit hole, because we haven't talked about real-world assets and tokenization and what that all means and how that really is a big killer use case that we don't talk about enough on this channel. So let's go over this.
What Tokenization Is and Why It Matters
Tokenization — it's not just me saying this. Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock, you know, around nine or ten trillion in assets under management, small little firm — he says, "If history is any guide," and he said this just in March, "tokenization today is roughly where the internet was in 1996." I remember those times. You'd get a little CD — I don't know if you guys even know what a CD is — you'd pop it in the computer, go to AOL, it would make this ridiculous sound, and then you would sometimes get on the internet, sometimes not. It would take five minutes to download one image. It was awesome.
And that's essentially where we're at. He states that when Amazon had sold just $16 million worth of books — because that's what Amazon was in the beginning; Jeff Bezos didn't come out to conquer everything, he said, "Hey, let's sell some books online" — and now of course it's a massive conglomerate. Three of today's Magnificent Seven tech giants hadn't even been founded in 1996. Tokenization could advance at the pace of the internet, faster than most expect, with enormous growth over the coming decades.
So what does tokenizing actually mean? Tokenizing ETFs, fixed income, equities, and private credit — what does that mean? It means you are taking one of those assets — an ETF, fixed income, equities, private credit, even treasuries — and you put it on the blockchain.
The Advantages of Tokenization
What are the advantages versus the disadvantages? First of all, when we put things on the blockchain, like equities or stocks, it's 24/7, 365, global liquidity. If you are a trader doing anything with money markets and you're missing out on time — especially with something like T-minus-3 settlement where you lose the whole weekend because they're on banker hours — you are missing all that yield, all that opportunity to make money. So 24/7, 365 is great. You can do this anytime, anywhere, and it gives access to people who just have a phone and maybe don't even have a bank. That is a big thing.
Fractional ownership lowers the entry barriers. Think about real estate and land. I don't have $10 million, but what if I could fractionalize that? What if instead of needing $10 million from one person, we break that up into a million little pieces? You bring more people in and you can actually fund things a lot faster, because it's very difficult to find someone with $10 million.
Lightning-fast settlement — instant instead of days. Finality is a big factor as well. Lower costs — fewer middlemen and less paperwork. We can cut all those middlemen and reduce those fees. Everybody's happy. Transparency — everything is on-chain and verifiable, unless you're going to use Midnight, or maybe even Polygon, which just rolled out the ability to be more private depending on the settings you choose.
And lastly, new investors — especially for private credit. Private credit is essentially giving out loans to specific businesses or organizations. If you're going to do private credit, you need a boatload of money. But what if you could fractionalize that? Get a couple thousand people in there. That's the beauty of tokenization and why I think digital assets are going to do so well moving forward.
The Risks and Obstacles
But we're early. I know people hate that, but it's true. And here's the downside — there are massive risks right now. This is why we need the Clarity Act. This is why we need a lot of legislation to go through, because if we don't get that, it's very difficult.
Frauds and scams — who here has been part of a scam? Raise your hand. Imagine you're a trillion-dollar asset management company and you're thinking, we like where we're at, but we don't want to lose everybody's money. Fraud and scams are a big problem. Then there are tech vulnerabilities — I just saw another seven or eight million dollars lost on the Ethereum chain. It wasn't Ethereum itself, it was some program running on top of it, but it was just gone like that. So you've got frauds, you've got hacks, there's a regulatory mess, and if we don't get clarity — which I don't think we are getting quickly enough — it's going to be a problem.
There's also the illusion of liquidity — bots moving back and forth, making it look like there's massive trading volume when it's actually just two guys. And then there are tax and legal headaches and cross-border issues. And one more thing: if you think about real estate and you tokenize it and the deal falls through, how do you prove it fell through on the blockchain? And even if a smart contract executes, what stops somebody from running away with the money because of a tech vulnerability? There are a lot of different things that go wrong with tokenization of assets, and that's why it's such a mess. That's why it's 1996.
Which Blockchains Are Winning on Real-World Assets
So I went down this rabbit hole to see how big things are getting. Ethereum, as of February 17th, surpassed $17 billion in volume — that's 315% growth. Pretty good. Polygon has $800 million, as of March. Tron partnered up with Securitize and is going to use that liquidity. And this is what we're talking about with permissioned versus permissionless — why big banks are going to absorb even these open ledgers, because there's so much liquidity and they want to bring it in. Then Solana, which we talked about yesterday, distributed assets over $2 billion, and stablecoin transfer volume hit $813 billion.
As I was going over these things, it's amazing how payments overlap with tokenization. You'll notice I've got Ethereum, Tron, Solana, XRP, Canton, Binance, and Polygon. Why those? Because there's a site I forgot about — rwa.xyz. This is real-world assets, and you can quantify how much money is being put into each ledger, each blockchain, each project.
If we zoom in on the distribution layers — the normal ones — you've got Ethereum, Binance, Solana, Stellar, Liquid, XRP, Arbitrum, Avalanche, and Plume. But then look at this one. If we take a look at all markets, what do you notice? There's one called Canton, and the total value it has on it is $358 billion. Let me say that again. Canton. $358 billion. You can go right to rwa.xyz and verify this. Providence, Ethereum, BNB, XRP, Solana, Stellar, Liquid — it's all right there.
When I took a look at this, I thought, wow, that's something to really look at. So now I can kind of see the winners that are emerging. Again, I'm not saying your altcoin is awful — it's just not here yet. This is just for real-world assets and stablecoins. Maybe your altcoin does something totally different. But as far as liquidity and volume, these are the bigger use cases.
Canton ETF and Polygon Upgrades
To really drive home who's buying this and why Wall Street is getting into it — this is from Eric Balchunas, senior ETF analyst for Bloomberg. He says, "Surprise, surprise — 21 Shares is launching a Canton ETF." And that's a spot ETF, not a futures. It's in the US. 50 basis points fee — very low. Interesting.
Polygon has also shored up some of their shortcomings. They reduced the block time to 1.75 seconds as the payments push accelerates, and they're also getting into real-world assets. Polygon delivered its first block time reduction upgrade since Genesis as the network seeks to position itself for more high-frequency applications.
There's a website we talked about yesterday — Chainspect — where you can look at how fast Polygon, Solana, Arbitrum, and others are performing. Ethereum versus Polygon: there's a reason why it's a layer-2 solution. 85 transactions per second, max TPS 537, max theoretical 2,380. You can compare that against anything on this website. BNB Chain actually crushes Polygon — 144 TPS, 3,000 max TPS, max theoretical 6,300. And Solana is crushing it, but you know what crushes Solana? ICP. It's not even close, which makes you wonder what the heck is going on with ICP.
Cardano's Performance
And then there's one more that people always talk about. I like Cardano — I have a stake pool and I'm hoping it does well. But when I see these comparisons, two things always happen. First, I realize how slow Cardano is. And the second is that everybody tells me, "But Rob, that's a EUTXO — those transactions can have many transactions inside." To that I say, okay, you got me on that one.
There's a great website called eutxo.org that shows just how many transactions are actually happening per block. You can see there's one transaction here, multiple transactions there — 16 transactions in this one block. You can see the block size, block height, block fill at 1%. But yeah, it's like watching paint dry. We could sit here for the next 20 minutes and watch it if you want. No. Okay. So we'll keep going.
Ondo Finance, XRP, and Cross-Border Treasury Settlement
This is from Ondo Finance, which I found interesting. Ondo Finance is mostly for real-world asset tokenization and is backed by BlackRock, but I did not see them over on rwa.xyz, which is kind of odd. You would think they'd be higher up there. However, Ondo is like, "Yeah, we don't need that." What did they partner up with? JP Morgan, Mastercard, and Ripple.
Nexus, by JP Morgan, Mastercard, and Ripple, successfully cleared a landmark pilot transaction connecting the XRP Ledger with interbank settlement rails. This milestone marks the first time tokenized US treasuries have settled across borders and banks in near real time, and outside traditional banking windows. Again, like we talked about — 24/7, 365. You know who likes that? America likes that, especially the current administration, because we want US treasuries to go far and wide so different countries will buy up our debt. Congratulations, XRP — doing great things.
Payments: Tangem Pay and MoneyGram x Kraken
As we move forward and talk about tokenization, we have to remember that the same altcoins doing well on tokenization are also doing well for payments. Payments is Binance, Ethereum, Solana, Tron, maybe a little Polygon, maybe a little Avalanche.
Congratulations to Tangem holders — Tangem being the cold storage device, my personal favorite. I'm not a big Ledger fan, just not. They just rolled this out: you can pay for anything anywhere with Tangem Pay. You have the app on your phone, and if you want to go to any place where Visa is accepted — which is pretty much everywhere — you can now have a virtual Visa card. USDC stays on-chain, you deposit USDC on Polygon into your self-custodial Tangem Pay account, it's converted one-to-one, and you get it right there for free.
And this one is big. MoneyGram just partnered up with Kraken. If you want to use remittances for cross-border transfers, MoneyGram is pretty much the way to go — or Western Union. They do about $200 billion in volume every year. Not too bad. But it looks like they just struck a deal with Kraken. Kraken crypto has moved well beyond its speculative roots, with reports indicating 420 million global holders. Adoption is being driven by stablecoins, DeFi, and institutional involvement. But the off-ramp challenge remains. Together, they're going to partner up to solve the last mile of crypto — moving value from screen to cash.
All this means is: you can have any crypto you hold, and if you want to move it cross-border, MoneyGram is going to facilitate that and allow the person you send it to to cash out. This is live right now. Crypto-to-cash withdrawals will roll out across Kraken platforms in phases — US probably first, then Europe, Latin America, Africa, and APAC. That is the last mile, and that's payments, and I like seeing that.
One more thing I did forget — MoneyGram isn't doing this out of the kindness of their heart. Here are the rates, using the example from Stellar and USDC. If you send $1 to $99, you pay $3. I don't know who's going to pay $3 to send a dollar, but up to $99 you're paying $3. $100 to $1,000, it's $4 plus 2% of the total. Then above $1,000, it's $15 plus 1% of the total. So it's not because this is out of the kindness of their heart. MoneyGram is here, just like us, to make some money.
Q&A
Rob: All right, let's get into the Q&A and answer some questions.
Enzo says Tangem Pay is not available in all of the US — he got an "area is not available" message when he tried. Enzo, where are you? Are you in New York? It's like nothing goes right in New York — as far as crypto and payments and your choice of mayors. I'm just kidding. Not really. But yeah, I don't know what's going on over there. And then also for some reason Oregon and maybe California.
Rusty is correct — SUI has processed over one trillion in stablecoin volume since launch. One trillion. Wow. The Mysten Labs co-founder said that in an interview with The Block at Consensus. I've got to take a look at that. Let's hope it gets adopted faster.
Swe Rational says, "I don't want any financial stuff on my phone. Keep security tight." Yeah, I can see that.
Shalon says, "I hate Tangem. Choose a seed phrase option — basically give Google and Apple your seed phrase because they can read your screen. If Tangem goes away, so does your crypto." Let me ask you this, Shalon. Why are you doing that with Tangem? I tried that just so I could show people how to do it. I'm not using that option. I'm using the three-card option because I don't want to deal with that — that's the safest thing. Also, there's never been a hack on Tangem, as opposed to Ledger. Although that hack was a little different — it was all personal information. And that's why I get emails constantly from scammers who know exactly where I live, which is a big problem.
Someone mentions the Cardano case where every pixel moved by the mouse is a transaction — literally limitless millions of transactions in no time. I remember seeing this at the Las Vegas Expo. It was like the game Wolfenstein 3D or Duke Nukem — I was getting confused. Charles was there and he was playing the game and every move was a transaction. I thought, that's cool. Now get some stablecoins. But yeah, I mean, that's great. I hope it does well. I've got a big fat bag of Cardano and it pains me to see it not do well, but these are things that happen. Let the market decide.
Sweet Miami says those fees are a little more expensive than PayPal. Yeah, I mean, people say, "Oh, this is great," but I think we're getting fleeced, quite honestly. I appreciate MoneyGram opening that up, but it seems kind of ridiculous.
Captain says, "Last year only two of my tokens hit their all-time high. Both were meme coins. Any sign of an alt season?" No. But I've got to tell you, there's this post that keeps taking up space in my head. I shared this with my group recently. This is about a guy named Leopold Aschenbrenner — he used to work for OpenAI. He knew pretty well what was going on in the AI space, but he didn't invest everything into Nvidia or Google. He just invested in the picks and shovels. And he turned — don't get too crazy — a 25-year-old just turned $225 million into $5.5 billion. First of all, where the hell did this kid get $225 million? Congratulations. Second of all, that's roughly a 20x to 25x. So whatever you take — let's just say it's $100,000 and you do a 20x — I'll take that.
Here's what he bought: Bloom Energy, CoreWeave, Intel, Core Scientific, Iris Energy, Applied Digital, SanDisk — which we talked about a couple of days ago — Cipher Mining. And look at those one-year returns. Crazy. Just crazy. So it's taking up space in my head because I'm like, damn it, I missed that. But you get FOMO and whatever. I think there's still a long way to run.
I was taking a look at Ivan's Bull Mania tool — he has stocks now. I looked at Bloom Energy. It flipped bullish three weeks ago and it's up 104%. I'll take that. That's not bad. CoreWeave — 10% in two weeks. And Intel — 333% in eight months. Imagine going up 333% in eight months. Now, you could probably do that with a memecoin, but good luck. Anyhow, I took a look at all of these and they were all right in line with what Ivan's tool was showing. I just thought it was interesting and it's taking up a lot of space in my head.
Shinon says, "Ivan did not call the October top. I watched the episode — he spent one minute looking at the charts saying maybe this could go lower, then spent another 30 minutes saying bullish things. That doesn't count." True. But if you take a look at some of the videos he did in November, he's like, "Look, it's not bullish anymore." And that was it. So yeah, he did not call the top — that's true. But damn it, who the hell calls the top? That's tough. Who calls the bottom? There's always somebody. We'll see it on X pretty soon.
Finally got to Ondo. I had to take a look at it because I wasn't sure. Ondo's done pretty well recently, but boy did it take a hit over the one-year time frame — it's down 60%. In just a year. But I wonder — what the heck happened? It was doing so good. Probably because all altcoins went down. So maybe this is a good time to buy — not financial advice. It was 21 cents in the beginning, and it's only been out since 2024. That is something to look at. Maybe it's just undervalued. It looks good. It's backed by the right people.
Smiley's got a good question: "Do you ever think ETH is going to hit $10,000?" Yes. And by the end of this year, Ethereum will be somewhere between $3,000 and $20,000. Somewhere in that range. I'm undefeated on price predictions. I cannot be stopped.