Mapping The RWA Ecosystem
To conclude our month-long dive into RWAs, we are excited to feature some of the exceptional teams already building around the ecosystem. We understand the taxonomy of RWA companies as follows:
Issuance: The applications, standards, and asset managers providing interfaces and templates for trust-minimized RWA issuance. The scope of teams in this category will be as broad as the spectrum of assets ported on-chain.
Oracles: The sources and pipelines that bring asset data on-chain. As the RWA marketplace grows, so too will our reliance on performant and secure oracles.
Infrastructure: The protocols and tooling that support an accessible, liquid, and low-cost RWA market. Within the broader set of DeFi primitives that allow for supply growth and trading, a number of teams are focused specifically on RWAs.
10 Companies To Watch
Be is building infrastructure that will allow smart contracts to supplant traditional legal agreements (e.g., SAFEs). It will automate common legal and financial actions related to RWAs, including fundraising, dispute resolution, and cap table management.
Cauris aims to extend credit to Fintechs in emerging markets via crypto rails. To date, Cauris has raised (and subsequently deployed) $15M through Goldfinch’s protocol.
Centrifuge’s core product, Tinlake, is a smart contract platform tokenizing RWAs, including invoices, microloans, and mortgages. It also offers legal recourse for liquidity providers in its lend/borrow pools.
Goldfinch’s protocol extends lines of credit in emerging markets. Through a two-sided mullet structure, Goldfinch allows users to lend, and verified financial institutions to access, permissioned, on-chain capital. Once implemented, its decentralized auditor system will be a seminal trust-minimized oracle.
MakerDAO, like many other large DeFi protocols (e.g., Aave), is experimenting with bringing assets on-chain to diversify collateral and yield. In so doing, it hopes to bolster its stablecoin (Dai) and lending marketplace, and to provide asset managers with access to on-chain credit markets. Its first credit facility, a partnership with Huntingdon Valley Bank, has demonstrated the powerful potential of crypto infrastructure paired with real-world liquidity.
Nation is building both the interface and curated smart contract templates for on-chain capital coordination. Additionally, the team is adding features to support governance of RWA investment vehicles (like Slow’s Hard Asset DAOs).
Ondo Finance is both an asset manager and infrastructure provider, enabling institutional-grade investment products to be accessed on-chain. Recently, the team announced the launch of a US Treasuries offering in collaboration Blackrock and PIMCO.
RWA Market, a combined effort by Centrifuge, Aave, and END_Labs, is a trading forum that supports tokenized assets, including real estate bridge loans, freight forwarding invoices, and trade receivables. This team aims to catalyze net new RWA issuance and to provide market participants with access to uncorrelated yields.
RWA.xyz is a data-visualization interface for relevant asset-performance characteristics. By aggregating information from off-chain and on-chain sources, RWA.xyz hopes to serve as the unified layer for all RWA data as issued supply and secondary marketplaces grow.
Teller is experimenting with leveraging ZK attestation to apply real-world credentials to on-chain creditworthines. The unsecured / under-collateralized lending it will enable is necessary to DeFi’s maturation.
About Slow Burn
Weekly explorations into emerging crypto trends and how to navigate 2023 from the Slow Crypto Team, Sam Lessin, Clay Robbins, and Caroline Cline