Tokenized Assets Must Become Tradable to Unlock Real Value
The real-world asset ( RWA) sector has spent years proving that traditional assets can be represented onchain. For Kevin Yunai, founder and CEO of RWA Inc, that debate is now largely settled. The more important question is whether tokenized assets can create better financial markets.
“Simple tokenization is putting an asset representation onchain,” Yunai said. “Productive onchain finance is when that asset becomes usable: tradable, financeable, pledgeable, composable, transparent, and connected to real economic yield.”
That distinction is central to the next phase of the RWA market. Tokenization alone can create a digital wrapper around an asset, but it does not automatically create liquidity, investor demand, transparency, or institutional confidence. The real innovation begins when tokenized assets become programmable financial instruments connected to verified cash flows, proper disclosures, compliant transferability, and usable market infrastructure.
In Yunai’s view, the sector has to move from issuance to utility. The strongest platforms will not simply help issuers mint asset-backed tokens. They will help those tokens function inside a broader financial ecosystem, with access to wallets, exchanges, custodians, DeFi infrastructure, reporting systems, and compliant secondary markets.
“Tokenization alone is not the innovation,” he said. “The innovation is turning real-world assets into programmable financial instruments with fixed supply.”
Liquidity Requires More Than Minting a Token
The RWA industry’s next bottleneck is not asset creation. It is tradability.
Many tokenized assets exist today, but relatively few are meaningfully liquid. Yunai believes this is because the market has over-indexed on issuance platforms while underbuilding the infrastructure needed to support active, trusted markets.
“The industry needs more than issuance platforms,” he said. “It needs full market infrastructure.”
That infrastructure includes regulated secondary markets, reliable market makers, standardized disclosures, trusted custody, verified pricing, interoperable compliance, identity layers, institutional settlement, and clear redemption mechanics.
Without those components, tokenized RWAs risk becoming static digital certificates rather than active financial instruments. Investors need to understand what they own, how the asset is valued, what risks they are taking, and how they can enter or exit positions under clear rules.
For Yunai, liquidity is not created by minting a token. It is created by trust, standards, distribution, and market depth. That means the RWA sector must develop the same institutional foundations that support traditional markets while using blockchain rails to make those markets more transparent, efficient, and accessible.
Respecting Both Blockchain and Legal Reality
A recurring mistake in tokenization is assuming that blockchain efficiency can replace legal and operational discipline. Yunai rejects that view.
“You have to respect both worlds,” he said. “ Blockchain gives speed, transparency, automation, and global reach. Real-world assets require legal enforceability, ownership structures, custody, KYC, reporting, valuation, and redemption processes.”
This balance is critical. A tokenized asset only has value if the token is connected to a clearly defined economic or ownership right. That right must be supported by legal documentation, asset custody, investor eligibility rules, transfer restrictions, reporting obligations, and redemption procedures.
In other words, the token cannot float separately from the real-world asset it represents. The legal structure has to be enforceable. The asset has to be verifiable. The investor’s rights have to be clear.
“At RWA Inc, we do not believe in pretending that legal reality disappears because an asset is tokenized,” Yunai said. “The correct model is to combine compliant legal structures with efficient blockchain rails.”
Blockchain can improve financial infrastructure, but it does not remove the need for proper governance. For institutions in particular, that distinction will determine whether RWAs remain a crypto-native experiment or become a mainstream asset class.
Access Comes Before Liquidity
A common argument for tokenization is that it will make traditionally illiquid assets easier to trade. Yunai believes this is true but incomplete. The first benefit is access.
Before tokenization, many investors were locked out of private assets because of geography, regulation, high minimum investment sizes, banking limitations, or intermediary control. Tokenization can reduce some of those barriers by making participation more efficient, fractional, and globally accessible.
Liquidity comes later.
“It is both, but access comes first,” Yunai said. “You cannot have sustainable liquidity without trusted access first.”
That sequencing matters. If an asset is made tradable before investors trust its structure or understand its risks, any liquidity that appears may be shallow or temporary. Sustainable liquidity depends on credible access, compliant distribution, verified information, and confidence in market rules.
The larger promise of tokenization, then, is not simply that investors may be able to sell assets more easily. It is that more investors may be able to participate in opportunities that were previously unavailable to them.
The Standards Institutions Need
For RWAs to become mainstream, institutional investors need confidence. That requires far more than technical infrastructure.
Yunai believes the market needs clear standards around asset verification, custody, legal enforceability, valuation, disclosures, audits, compliance, KYC and AML controls, transfer restrictions, redemption rights, and ongoing reporting.
The goal is comparability. Institutions need to be able to evaluate tokenized assets in the same disciplined way they evaluate traditional financial products. They need to know what they own, who controls the asset, how cash flows are handled, what happens in default, how disputes are resolved, and how information is reported over time.
Without common standards, the RWA market risks fragmentation. Each issuer, platform, jurisdiction, and asset category could operate under different assumptions, making it difficult for investors to assess risk across products. However, with standards, RWAs can become more than a collection of isolated tokenization experiments. They can become an institutional asset class.
Where Value Accrues in the RWA Stack
As tokenization matures, value will not be distributed evenly across the stack. Asset originators, custodians, compliance providers, exchanges, and DeFi protocols all have important roles to play. But Yunai believes the most strategic position will belong to platforms that control trust, distribution, and liquidity.
“The most value will go to the platforms that control trust, distribution, and liquidity,” he said.
That means the winners will not necessarily be the companies that tokenize the most assets. Issuance is only one part of the market. The more defensible opportunity is building trusted financial networks around tokenized assets.
These networks need to connect asset originators, investors, custodians, compliance systems, pricing data, market venues, and reporting infrastructure. They also need to provide confidence that the tokenized asset is real, enforceable, compliant, and usable.
Long term, Yunai believes investors should also capture meaningful value. If tokenization works as intended, it should reduce friction, increase transparency, lower access barriers, and open the door to higher-quality opportunities.
The real prize is not tokenizing assets for the sake of tokenization. It is building more efficient markets around them.
From Crypto Niche to Capital Markets Infrastructure
The RWA sector is often measured by the total value of assets tokenized. Yunai believes that the number will matter, but it should not be the only definition of success.
“Success is not only trillions of dollars tokenized,” he said. “That number will come if the infrastructure is built correctly.”
A more meaningful sign of progress would be deep secondary markets, institutional-grade standards, global investor access, transparent reporting, and tokenized assets becoming part of everyday financial infrastructure.
In five years, Yunai does not want RWAs to be viewed as a crypto niche. He sees them as part of the next evolution of capital markets, where real assets, digital rails, compliant access, and programmable finance operate together.
That vision requires the industry to move beyond basic issuance. It needs market depth, legal clarity, investor protections, trusted infrastructure, and assets that produce real economic value.
“The goal is not just to tokenize the old financial system,” Yunai said. “The goal is to build a better one.”
