In a maturing market, tokenising real-world assets is now a genuine, developing, and proven product. The tokenised RWA market has grown 166% over the past year (source: rwa.xyz).
If you asked most market participants three or four years ago what tokenisation meant, the answer would have been largely focused on theory and experimentation. It was a concept that hadn’t yet fully translated into real financial infrastructure, but as tokenisation moves from concept to implementation, the question now is how we structure, regulate and make them usable in real-world markets.
Asset managers, issuers and sponsors should now be actively assessing how tokenised structures can enhance liquidity, broaden investor access and future-proof their offering.
This article discusses the market shift and legal and custodial requirements of real-world asset (RWA) tokenisation, as well as its integration beyond the technology.
Why is RWA tokenisation gaining momentum?
BlackRock CEO Larry Fink said in October last year, “we’re at the beginning of the tokenisation of all assets”, with Paul Atkins, the SEC Chair, making a similar statement in a December 2025 interview: “all US markets will be on-chain within two years”.
The popularity of RWAs has grown thanks largely to their breadth of offering, liquidity and flexibility. Developments in this space are increasingly moving toward building investable products with institutional standards, with a wider range of underlying asset classes.
RWAs are particularly compelling because they combine digitised ownership with exposure to something more familiar and tangible, whether that is a commodity, real estate, private debt or a fund product. That creates the potential for broader access and lower barriers to entry, greater flexibility, reduced cost and more efficient market infrastructure.
However, a tokenised asset will only succeed where there is a clear reason for investors to hold it and a market infrastructure capable of supporting it. This is particularly true for commodity-backed tokens. There needs to be clear legal title to the underlying asset, with the title, ownership and insolvency risks clearly documented. There must be reliable custody arrangements, including whether the underlying commodity asset is linked to a particular token or whether the token relates to a pro-rata share of a wider pool of commodities.
The classification of the custody of the underlying assets will impact other considerations, including counterparty risk, insolvency risk, the ability to grant security over the token and the redemption mechanics and options. Investors also expect transparent, verifiable and on-chain proof of reserves of the assets backing the tokens. Independent audits, insurance coverage and robust disclosure all become essential components of investor protection and tie into the marketability of the product based on investor confidence in the underlying RWA token offering. Token issuers must comply with anti-money laundering regimes, implement counter-terrorist financing and counter-proliferation financing measures, and comply with international sanctions, with ongoing monitoring to meet applicable laws and mitigate risk.
The next phase: integrating RWAs into the broader market
Many tokenised assets have historically lacked real utility once issued. They remained on-chain but often in relatively closed systems without integration into broader financial markets. When people talk about tokenisation of RWAs, the focus is often on the technology, blockchain, programmability, fractionalisation and faster settlement. Tokenisation of RWAs is more than this. It is about taking assets that have traditionally sat in conventional legal and financial structures and structuring them to make them move more effectively through digital infrastructure without losing legal certainty or commercial credibility.
The BVI and the Cayman Islands remain market leaders in this space. They offer a flexible but well-understood legal and regulatory environment, with a technology-neutral approach and a focus on the substance of the activity being carried on rather than the novelty of the technology itself. The regulatory perimeter is clear, and participants must understand which functions sit inside and outside it, as well as how to structure accordingly.
Tokenisation in action
Ogier advises NUVA on its marketplace, which connects issuers and users to a new range of financial products, allowing exposure to institutional-grade RWAs through permissionless infrastructure with permissioned access. Backed by Animoca Brands and Nuva Labs, NUVA, launched on the Ethereum blockchain, utilises a combination of BVI and Cayman Islands structures to provide a platform which bridges institutional-quality RWAs to decentralised finance (DeFi). On its launch, NUVA brought approximately US$19 billion worth of tokenised assets on-chain, sourced from traditional financial markets. In doing so, NUVA’s model has opened up institutional-grade products to retail participants who typically cannot access them through traditional finance channels.
NUVA’s platform launched with two initial products. The first is nvYLDS, a treasury-linked yield vault tied to a US SEC-regulated stablecoin backed by short-dated treasuries and bank deposits, with more than US$500 million in circulating supply. The second is nvPRIME, a token backed by a US$18.4 billion portfolio of home equity lines of credit, currently offering yields above 7%.
Users interact with the platform by depositing stablecoins into asset-backed vaults. In return, they receive ERC-20 tokens that serve as receipts for the deposited assets and represent a proportional interest in the vault. Crucially, those tokens are not static. They can be traded, used as collateral or integrated into other DeFi applications.
NUVA goes beyond static digital wrappers and instead creates composable financial instruments. The NUVA project demonstrates that tokenisation is now operating at institutional scale. These products are tied to real balance sheets and real capital markets and show how distribution is evolving.
Tokenisation can extend access to assets that were previously restricted, although that still needs to be balanced carefully with regulatory requirements and ongoing governance. Perhaps most importantly, tokenisation is becoming part of the underlying infrastructure of financial markets. The focus is shifting from issuance to distribution.
Stuart Fee is a partner in Ogier’s British Virgin Islands team advising on all aspects of corporate and commercial, regulatory, technology and web3, and investment funds law.
