One of the biggest areas of interest in crypto at the moment is RWA. This is an abbreviation for “Real World Asset”. As the name may reveal, it means an asset in the real world. Of course some meaning is added by combining this with crypto. Briefly explained it means assets in the real world (like a building or bonds) and they are given a crypto counterpart. So basically a token which represents the RWA.
Introduction
So as mentioned before RWA stands for “Real World Asset”, an asset in the real world digitized on the blockchain. Imagine owning a piece of real estate or a share of a company, but instead of traditional paperwork, you hold a digital token on a blockchain. That’s the essence of RWA tokens. They represent ownership of real-world assets, transforming them into a digital format accessible within the crypto ecosystem.
This means that the digital asset of the RWA can be traded.
This opens doors to a plethora of benefits:
- Increased Liquidity: Traditionally, assets like real estate can be illiquid, meaning they’re difficult to buy and sell quickly. RWA tokens can be easily traded, making them more accessible to a wider range of investors.
- Fractional Ownership: RWA tokens allow for fractional ownership of assets. This means you can invest in a piece of a multi-million dollar property without needing the entire sum upfront.
- Transparency and Security: Blockchain technology provides a secure and transparent way to track ownership and transactions of RWA tokens.
Examples of RWA Tokens
Here are a few real-world examples:
- Security Tokens: These tokens represent ownership in a company or project. Imagine investing in a startup through a security token offering on a blockchain platform.
- Real Estate Tokens: Real estate ownership can be fragmented into tokens, allowing for easier investment and management.
- Commodities: Owning a piece of the gold market or a barrel of oil could become a reality with RWA tokens representing these commodities.
5 RWA tokens
Now that you know what RWA tokens are and know some examples what you could do with it. Let’s take a look at 5 of the most popular RWA projects out there.
To get a full overview of RWA coins, you can check out Coinmarketcap:
https://coinmarketcap.com/view/real-world-assets/
“Ondo is building the next generation of financial infrastructure to improve market efficiency, transparency, and accessibility.“
That is their official short explanation of what they are. Looks like some buzzwords and doesn’t really say that much. Reading their documents doesn’t really make it any clearer, but luckily their website does show clearly what they are about.
Ondo is mainly focussed on the American financial market, and allows you to buy into tokenized versions of treasuries.
Ondo came out in 2024 and gained popularity quite fast with the RWA hype and became one of the market leaders in this sector. A popular phrase on Twitter is “Ondo gets you a condo”.
The current price is $0.85 with a marketcap of around 1.1 billion.
Coinmarketcap
https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/ondo-finance/
Website
https://ondo.foundation/
“Decentralized Infrastructure
For Real World Asset Metrics“
“Precise and up-to-date information ensures that digital representations of real-world assets are accurate, trustworthy, and capable of fostering confidence among investors.”
Truflation offers data of Inflation and prices for real world assets. “From speculating on prices of orange juice and uranium to enabling BTC-denominated oil, gas, and corn prices, Truflation provides the key to unlocking a diverse array of financial markets and instruments in the Web3 world.”
They track a very broad amount of prices. So they could be a platform through which a lot of RWA’s could be accessed. Their token came out in 2024. So far it hasn’t gotten very much attention, but who knows what may happen. Their platform seems to be known by big names in crypto and they are backed by Coinbase and Chainlink.
The current price is $0.49 with a marketcap of around 46 million.
Coinmarketcap
https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/truflation/
Website
https://truflation.com/
“Polymesh is an institutional-grade permissioned blockchain built specifically for regulated assets. It streamlines antiquated processes and opens the door to new financial instruments by solving the challenges around governance, identity, compliance, confidentiality, and settlement.“
Unlike the other coins in the list they offer an entire blockchain (instead of 1 specific platform or usecase) for RWA’s.
It came out in 2022, before the RWA hype, and with that it is the oldest coin on our list.
The current price is $0.39 with a marketcap of around 330 million.
Coinmarketcap
https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/polymesh/
Website
https://polymesh.network/
“Speculate on Rising & Falling Real Estate Markets“
Parcl is a one of a kind platform, which came out recently. They had an airdrop campaign, where users could earn points for using the platform. With that the platform has a lot of users and gained quite some hype.
As their explanation states, with Parcl you can speculate on the prices of real estate markets.
“The Parcl Ecosystem, which includes Parcl, Parcl Labs, and Parcl Limited, develops and governs the Parcl Protocol, a decentralized exchange that allows users to get long or short exposure to real-world real estate prices via a decentralized exchange.
Parcl’s primary intention is to create a liquid market around the largest asset class in the world by leveraging novel, world-class real estate data from Parcl Labs.”
The current price is $0.34 with a marketcap of around 43 million.
Coinmarketcap
https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/parcl/
Website
https://www.parcl.co/
“The standard tokenization process can be painfully slow and extremely expensive for the average user.
TokenFi gives users all they need to create a token or tokenize Real World Assets (RWA) in a simple all-in-one platform without writing a line of code!“
TokenFi was quite hyped when it came out. This is because the team behind TokenFi already has another project, namely Floki, one of the biggest memecoins. It doesn’t happen often a team has 2 projects. Mostly they dump the first one and move on to another, but the Floki team is just built different I guess.
So they have a memecoin and a more serious platform. TokenFi offers a variety of tools, one of them is a (RWA) token launch tool.
The current price is $0.09 with a marketcap of around 96 million.
Coinmarketcap
https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/tokenfi/
Website
https://www.tokenfi.com/