Leading Crypto Projects Transforming Real-World Asset Tokenization in 2024

The blockchain landscape is witnessing a remarkable shift as crypto tokenization reshapes how investors interact with traditional financial assets. This evolution represents a fundamental restructuring of the investment ecosystem, with digital representations of physical assets gaining unprecedented traction.

The Rise and Scale of RWA Markets

Since its experimental roots in the early 2010s through colored coins on Bitcoin, asset tokenization has matured significantly. The Ethereum network’s 2015 launch provided the technological foundation that transformed tokenization from concept to reality. By March 2024, the global market for RWA-focused cryptocurrencies had reached $8.4 billion in aggregate valuation, marking substantial institutional interest in this emerging sector.

The watershed moment came with BlackRock’s entry into on-chain asset management. The firm’s BUIDL fund—positioned as the USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund on Ethereum—fundamentally validated the RWA thesis. This offering delivers daily accrued dividends directly to investor wallets while maintaining exposure to U.S. Treasury instruments and repurchase agreements. The BUIDL initiative demonstrates how traditional finance’s most powerful players now view blockchain infrastructure not as experimental technology but as essential infrastructure for next-generation wealth management.

Supporting ecosystem players including Anchorage Digital Bank NA, BitGo, Coinbase, and Fireblocks have collectively built the infrastructure layer making this transformation possible.

Why Physical Assets Need Blockchain: The Investment Case

Crypto tokenization eliminates the artificial scarcity that has long constrained investment access. Several mechanisms drive this transformation:

Fractional Ownership at Scale — Traditional assets often require substantial capital commitments. Tokenization breaks these assets into divisible units, enabling retail participation in asset classes previously reserved for institutional investors. A commercial real estate portfolio worth $50 million becomes accessible to investors with $1,000 to deploy.

Liquidity Where It Previously Stalled — Real estate, fine art, and private credit securities suffer from liquidity constraints inherent to their nature. Blockchain markets operate continuously, removing the friction of traditional transfer processes that once required weeks to settle.

Borderless Capital Formation — Geographic arbitrage disappears when assets trade on global blockchain networks. Investors in Singapore access U.S. Treasury tokenization on identical terms as those in New York.

DeFi as Financial Lego — Tokenized assets become composable. A U.S. Treasury token becomes collateral for loans, wrapped into yield strategies, or traded in perpetual markets—all within hours rather than the days required by traditional settlement infrastructure.

The Projects Leading This Transformation

Ondo Finance: Specializing in Treasury Tokenization

Ondo Finance occupies a focused position within the RWA landscape—it has built specialized infrastructure specifically for U.S. Treasury tokenization. The platform’s OUSG represents the world’s first institutional-grade tokenized Treasury product.

The Flux Finance lending protocol demonstrates practical utility: it accepts OUSG as collateral, creating a self-reinforcing ecosystem where tokenized assets generate economic activity within on-chain finance. ONDO governance tokens allow community participation in protocol evolution decisions.

A significant 2024 development involved Ondo’s decision to migrate $95 million in Treasury assets into BlackRock’s BUIDL fund. This institutional-to-institutional move signifies something crucial: established crypto protocols now treat traditional finance infrastructure (BlackRock’s offerings) as compatible building blocks rather than competing systems. OUSG’s increased utility within the broader crypto ecosystem positions OUSG holders to benefit from expanding use cases.

Mantra: Building Compliance Infrastructure for Asia-Pacific

Mantra (OM) represents a different approach—rather than tokenizing specific assets, it constructs the foundational infrastructure enabling others to build RWA markets.

Current Data — OM Token:

• Price: $0.08
• 24h Change: +0.96%
• Market Cap: $90.68M
• Trading Volume: $464.70K

Following a $11 million funding round led by Shorooq Partners in 2023, Mantra positioned itself as the regulatory-compliant base layer for RWA development. The platform emphasizes Middle East and Asia market access, regions with significant capital pools but limited exposure to blockchain infrastructure.

The OM token functions as both governance mechanism and staking asset—holders who commit capital to network operations earn passive yield while voting on protocol parameters. This dual-purpose tokenomics aligns incentives between protocol developers and capital providers.

Polymesh: Securities-Grade Infrastructure

Polymesh (POLYX) represents infrastructure specialization—it exists solely to serve the securities tokenization market.

Current Data — POLYX Token:

• Price: $0.06
• 24h Change: -1.00%
• Market Cap: $71.87M
• Trading Volume: $126.84K

The platform distinguishes itself by embedding compliance, governance, identity verification, and settlement finality into its core architecture rather than bolting these functions onto a general-purpose blockchain. This institutional-grade design acknowledges reality: securities tokenization cannot succeed without addressing regulatory requirements from inception.

POLYX’s asymptotic tokenomics model creates controlled scarcity. The supply approaches but never reaches a fixed ceiling, with new token generation following algorithmic rules. This design prevents both runaway inflation and premature supply exhaustion, maintaining long-term network incentive alignment.

OriginTrail: Knowledge Graphs Meet Physical Assets

OriginTrail (TRAC) addresses a often-overlooked RWA requirement—verifiable data integrity across supply chains.

Current Data — TRAC Token:

• Price: $0.43
• 24h Change: -0.61%
• Market Cap: $194.12M
• Trading Volume: $39.97K

The project’s Decentralized Knowledge Graph technology creates AI-ready digital representations of supply chain information. This proves especially valuable for asset classes where provenance matters: luxury goods, pharmaceuticals, conflict minerals, and agricultural products. By tokenizing these assets alongside cryptographic proof of their origin and movement, OriginTrail enables investors to verify authenticity alongside ownership transfer.

TRAC’s multichain deployment ensures functionality across diverse blockchain ecosystems, preventing infrastructure lock-in while maintaining cross-chain composability.

Pendle: Separating Yield from Principal

Pendle (PENDLE) pioneered a sophisticated financial engineering approach—decomposing yield-bearing assets into tradeable components.

Current Data — PENDLE Token:

• Price: $2.16
• 24h Change: -1.54%
• Market Cap: $365.39M
• Trading Volume: $271.53K

By separating Principal Tokens (PT) from Yield Tokens (YT), Pendle enables hedging, speculation, and yield optimization strategies previously impossible in on-chain markets. An investor holding U.S. Treasury tokenization can sell future yield to access immediate liquidity while retaining principal ownership. Another participant bets on rising rates by acquiring discounted yield tokens.

Recent expansion into RWA support—including Flux Finance’s fUSDC and MakerDAO collateral—marks Pendle’s evolution from pure DeFi protocol into a bridge connecting traditional and decentralized finance. This positioning attracts substantial institutional capital seeking yield management tools.

TokenFi: Democratizing Asset Tokenization

TokenFi (TOKEN) takes an opposing approach to Polymesh’s compliance-first specialization—it prioritizes accessibility and ease of use.

Current Data — TOKEN Token:

• Price: $0.01
• 24h Change: -9.23%
• Market Cap: $19.44M
• Trading Volume: $1.01M

The platform targets the $16 trillion RWA market anticipated by 2030 by removing technical barriers. Its Token Launcher enables non-developers to create ERC-20 and BEP20 compliant tokens without coding expertise. Generative AI tooling simplifies NFT creation, while institutional connection protocols facilitate deeper liquidity than self-directed issuers could achieve.

TOKEN serves as the utility layer: users pay in TOKEN to access platform functionality, creating a direct relationship between platform adoption and token utility.

Supporting Infrastructure: Securitize and Others

Securitize has established itself as the compliance backbone for securities tokenization since 2017. By 2022, merely three years post-launch, its marketplace ranked among America’s top 10 stock transfer agents by activity volume, servicing over 1.2 million accounts across 3,000 institutional clients. BlackRock’s strategic investment and board-level participation amplify Securitize’s validation within traditional finance.

Untangled Finance, having raised $13.5 million in October 2023, focuses specifically on private credit tokenization. Its Celo network deployment targets developing economies where traditional credit markets remain underpenetrated.

Swarm Markets (SMT), with $5.4 million TVL as of March 2024, emphasizes TradFi-DeFi bridging through strict regulatory compliance. Its July 2023 partnership with Mattereum created comprehensive on-chain securitization solutions.

MakerDAO: Established DeFi Meets RWAs

MakerDAO (MKR), among Ethereum’s oldest protocols, demonstrates how established DeFi systems integrate real-world assets. By March 2024, RWAs comprised just under 30% of MakerDAO’s balance sheet—representing $2.06 billion of its $6.6 billion total locked value.

This composition reflects institutional capital inflows. Borrowers tokenize Treasury instruments, deploy the resulting DAI stablecoin throughout DeFi markets, and maintain Treasury collateral exposure—effectively using blockchain as a settlement and composability layer rather than replacing traditional finance.

Market Maturation Indicators

Several patterns suggest RWA tokenization has transitioned from experimental to foundational:

The regulatory environment is crystallizing. Frameworks now exist in multiple jurisdictions specifying how digital securities must operate, eliminating previous legal uncertainty. Institutional adoption accelerates when regulation provides clarity rather than ambiguity.

Market liquidity continues expanding. Assets that previously required months to settle now transfer within minutes, creating genuine economic advantages for tokenized versions alongside their traditional counterparts.

DeFi innovation incorporates RWA components as standard functionality. Protocols no longer debate whether to support tokenized real-world assets—they debate which implementations best serve their user base.

Conclusion: The Convergence Accelerates

The projects discussed represent not competing visions but complementary layers of an emerging financial infrastructure. Some prioritize compliance and institutional service, others emphasize accessibility and ease of use, still others build specialized markets for particular asset classes.

The collective effect transforms crypto tokenization from speculative experiment into practical financial tooling. As regulatory frameworks solidify, institutional participation deepens, and user experience improves, the $8.4 billion current market for RWA-focused cryptocurrencies will likely expand substantially. The investment landscape is being fundamentally reshaped by projects making crypto tokenization the default method for accessing traditionally illiquid assets globally.