RWA Tokenization on Injective: Bringing Trillions On-Chain

Key Takeaways

• One of the most talked-about sectors in the crypto market recently is RWA. RWA refers to the tokenization of real world assets on-chain, making transactions more accessible and transparent. Compared to 2021, the market size has grown an incredible 38 times in just four years.
  

• The rapid growth of the RWA market can be attributed to factors such as the approval of Bitcoin ETFs, the launch of BlackRock’s BUIDL fund, and the recent shift in the U.S. government's stance toward being more crypto-friendly. In the midst of these opportunities, Injective has emerged as one of the notable projects leading the advancement of RWA.
  

• Injective is optimized for RWA from both a technical and business perspective. It has steadily onboarded a wide range of RWA tokens including stablecoins, stocks, commodities, and funds. In this article, we take a deep dive into RWA tokenization on the Injective Network.

1. The Next Phase of the Blockchain Industry: RWA

1.1 The Rapidly Growing RWA Market

In the past, the crypto market was driven by dopamine-fueled hype cycles, from DeFi Summer to NFTs, Play-to-Earn games, meme tokens, and AI projects. Compared to that, today's crypto market feels surprisingly calm. This shift seems to reflect the normalization of the market as traditional finance capital flows in following the launch of Bitcoin and Ethereum ETFs.

Even in this calmer environment, there is one sector whose growth continues steadily upward: Real World Assets (RWA). According to rwa.xyz, the size of the RWA market has grown from about $500 million in April 2021 to roughly $19 billion today, a staggering 38 times increase in just four years. For comparison, the total crypto market cap has only risen by about 150 percent, from $2 trillion to $3 trillion, during the same period.

Beyond the numbers, the momentum behind RWA is easy to see. News and discussions about RWA are flooding crypto communities on platforms like Twitter and Telegram daily, and venture capital investment into RWA-focused projects has intensified. It is clear that RWA has become one of the hottest topics in crypto right now.

1.2 Why Now is the Perfect Moment for RWA

So why has interest in RWA surged so rapidly? Rather than a purely speculative trend, the rise of RWA is being driven by investor demand for predictable yields and the stability of real-world asset backing. This trend stems from changes in market sentiment following ETF approvals, the entry of traditional financial institutions into the RWA space, and shifts in U.S. government and regulatory policy.

1.2.1 Shift in Market Sentiment After Bitcoin Spot ETF Approval

Source: Farside Investors

If we had to name a single event that changed traditional finance’s perception of crypto, it would be the approval of Bitcoin spot ETFs. BlackRock, the world's largest asset manager, triggered a market turnaround by filing for a Bitcoin spot ETF, which soon led other asset managers to follow. When the ETFs were finally approved and launched, institutional participation in the crypto market accelerated. This brought not only a wave of capital inflows but also a significant improvement in market sentiment. BlackRock CEO Larry Fink even made several strongly supportive statements about Bitcoin during this time.

On top of this, the approval of Ethereum spot ETFs further strengthened institutional interest in RWA. Tokenizing real world assets requires smart contracts, so the regulatory approval of Ethereum spot ETFs reassured investors that smart contract platforms like Ethereum were becoming increasingly legitimate, making RWA a more attractive investment option.

1.2.2 Traditional Finance's Entry into the RWA Market

Source: rwa.xyz

BlackRock, which led the charge with Bitcoin spot ETFs, launched an on-chain digital liquidity fund called BUIDL in partnership with Securitize in March 2024. The fund offers tokenized access to U.S. Treasuries, cash, and repo agreements. In just over a year, the fund grew from around $600 million to approximately $2.5 billion by April 25, 2025, achieving a market share of over 40 percent in the tokenized U.S. Treasury sector.

Other traditional finance giants have followed suit. Franklin Templeton’s money market fund token BENJI has grown to around $700 million, and WisdomTree’s WTGXX tokenized fund has reached about $100 million. The entry of these institutions has not only provided liquidity but also brought credibility to the RWA sector, further fueling its explosive growth.

1.2.3 Regulatory and Government Policy Shifts

Finally, one of the biggest factors behind the recent surge in RWA growth is the clarification of regulatory frameworks in the United States. In the past, legal uncertainty around crypto made traditional financial institutions hesitant to get involved. But recently, U.S. government agencies have accelerated efforts to pass laws and regulations governing digital assets.

The Lummis-Gillibrand Act, passed in July 2024, defined clearer jurisdiction for crypto assets, designating most commodity-like tokens under the CFTC and security-like tokens under the SEC. This move cleared up long-standing regulatory confusion and paved the way for a legal framework that supports RWA products.

In addition, with the Trump administration taking office, the previously hostile stance of the SEC toward crypto has started to soften. Early in 2025, the SEC dropped investigations, enforcement actions, and lawsuits against projects like Immutable, Coinbase, and Kraken. Many in the industry view this as a shift toward providing clearer guidelines rather than indiscriminate crackdowns.

Although not directly related to RWA, new legislative proposals like the GENIUS Act and the STABLE Act, focused on stablecoins, are also moving through Congress. These initiatives are rapidly integrating stablecoins into the traditional financial system. The combination of government support, regulatory clarity, and legislative action is removing uncertainty from the crypto market and creating the perfect environment for blockchain and real world assets to converge and grow.

1.3 What Types of RWAs Are There?

So what exactly are RWAs and what kinds exist? RWA stands for Real World Assets, meaning real world assets such as real estate, bonds, intellectual property, and gold that have been tokenized using blockchain technology. By representing ownership of these assets on-chain and enabling their trade, blockchain makes transactions more efficient and transparent.

As of April 26, 2025, the major categories of RWAs, ranked by market size, are as follows:

• Private Credit ($12.9 billion)

• U.S. Treasuries ($6.2 billion)

• Commodities ($1.5 billion)

• Stocks ($484 million)

• Institutional Alternative Funds ($456 million)

• Non-U.S. Government Debt ($157 million)

• Corporate Bonds ($15 million)

• Others (Real Estate, Intellectual Property, Carbon Credits)

1.4 A Project to Watch in the RWA Sector: Injective

Source: Injective

If you are interested in the RWA sector, Injective is one of the standout projects worth paying attention to. Starting with the onboarding of Ondo’s USDY in November 2023, Injective has added a variety of yield-bearing stablecoins. In January 2024, it took a major step forward by integrating an RWA module at the network level, becoming the world’s first blockchain to natively support RWA infrastructure.

Injective is especially strong in stock-based RWAs. In March of this year, it launched a tokenization framework called iAssets, enabling the tokenization of various stocks. By early April 2025, Injective had achieved a dominant market share in on-chain stock token trading compared to other networks.

Although it's still early, iAssets has already attracted tremendous attention, recording over $350M in trading volume. In the current crypto market, RWA is mostly focused on bonds and stablecoins, but it's very encouraging that Injective is handling not just those, but also a wide range of RWAs including stocks.

In short, Injective is accelerating its focus on RWA from both a technical and business perspective. In the next section, we will take a closer look at how Injective is making this possible.

2. Why Injective is Specialized for RWA

2.1 Scalability for Seamless Transactions

One of the biggest reasons for converting real world assets into RWA tokens is to facilitate smoother trading. For this to happen, the scalability of the network underlying the RWA tokens is crucial.

Injective achieves instant finality because it is built on Tendermint BFT consensus. Once a block is created, it is immediately finalized and cannot be reverted. This quick finality is an important feature for RWA transactions. Notably, Injective’s block time is just 0.67 seconds, and each block can theoretically handle up to 100MB of data, allowing the network to process large volumes of transactions extremely quickly. Injective achieves its high scalability through several key optimizations:

• Optimized State Synchronization and Data Handling: Injective enhances the speed of reading and writing blockchain states by refining its data structure.

• Enhanced Resource Management: Injective improves how it handles system resources and disk usage.

• Upgraded Consensus Algorithm: Injective has upgraded its consensus mechanism, allowing it to reach agreement faster than traditional Tendermint BFT and speeding up block production.

Source: Injective

Injective continues to upgrade its network for better performance. The most recent Lyora upgrade introduced features like dynamic gas adjustment based on network demand, a new mempool system prioritizing urgent transactions, and security enhancements across core modules. Through these continuous improvements, Injective provides an infrastructure optimized for both scalability and security, ideal for RWA activities.

2.2 Modules Specialized for RWA

Injective is a blockchain built with the Cosmos SDK, which structures blockchains using modular components. Examples of default modules include auth for account management, bank for token transfers, and staking for staking functions.

Beyond these standard modules, Injective offers custom modules specialized for financial applications, enabling institutions and users to access RWA services more easily.

2.2.1 Exchange Module

The exchange module is a core part of Injective, recording and matching buy and sell orders across order book protocols within the ecosystem. In many ecosystems, even when multiple order book protocols exist on the same network, liquidity often remains fragmented. On Injective, protocols share unified liquidity through the exchange module, delivering deeper liquidity and a superior trading experience. (For reference, the exchange module provides liquidity for an on-chain order book that can be applied in a plug-and-play manner, not liquidity for an AMM.)

The exchange module supports both spot and futures markets. Built on Injective’s high scalability, it can process user transactions at high speed. It also uses Frequent Batch Auctions to defend against front-running and sandwich attacks, creating an environment highly optimized for financial trading and RWAs.

2.2.2 RWA Module

Injective's RWA module was introduced during the Volan mainnet upgrade in January 2024. The RWA module has three main functions:

• Tokenization: It enables the conversion of various real-world assets like government bonds, fiat currencies, and credit products into digital tokens.

• Access Control: It allows the setup of allowlists so that only specific addresses can access certain assets, helping support regulatory compliance.

• Institutional Friendliness: It grants financial institutions the authority to directly issue and manage assets, making it easier to launch on-chain financial products.

In addition, the Altaris mainnet upgrade, introduced in August 2024, brought the RWA Oracle. The RWA Oracle delivers real-time price data of real-world assets onto the blockchain, allowing dApps to use reliable information. It supports price feeds for a variety of asset classes, including stocks, bonds, and ETFs.

The combination of the RWA module and the Oracle allows participants in the ecosystem to access the RWA market much more easily and securely.

2.3 iAssets

Source: Helix

iAssets is Injective’s standard infrastructure for tokenizing real world assets. These tokenized RWAs are digital assets designed to mirror the price movements of real world assets. They allow users to invest in assets like gold, stocks, and foreign currencies without directly owning them.

In traditional finance, settlement delays like T+1 or T+2 tie up capital and lower capital efficiency. Access to certain products is also often restricted to accredited investors, and the complex layers of intermediaries lead to inherent inefficiencies. On-chain tokenized assets overcome these barriers by allowing anyone to participate 24/7 without the need for middlemen.

Historically, RWAs were synthetic assets created through overcollateralization by DeFi apps, as seen in protocols like Synthetix. Users had to lock up a significant amount of crypto (such as ETH or SNX) to mint synthetic assets, causing further capital inefficiencies.

Injective’s iAssets take a different approach. There is no need for overcollateralization to issue tokenized RWAs. Thanks to Injective’s exchange module, liquidity is shared across the ecosystem, and professional institutions provide liquidity from the start. This makes the market immediately functional without locking up excessive capital. Price feeds are sourced from Injective’s native oracle modules.

Currently, a wide range of iAssets such as iNVDA, iGOOGL, iHOOD, iMCD, iMSTR, iCOIN, iMSFT, iAAPL, iAMZN, iNFLX, iMETA, TTI, and TRADFI are being traded on Helix. The assets with an "i" in front are designed to track the prices of individual stocks, but interestingly, TTI and TRADFI are indexes that track the stock prices of major U.S. companies. Since Helix uses the exchange module, it benefits from deep liquidity. A major advantage is that exchange module also supports leveraged trading, allowing users to trade stocks of major U.S. companies with up to 25x leverage.

2.4 Strategic Validator Onboarding

Injective is not only optimizing its technology and infrastructure for RWA but is also strategically onboarding validators to build a Web3 infrastructure tailored for institutions. The onboarding of validators like Republic, a platform for tokenization and private investments, and KDAC, a Korean crypto custody company, strengthens Injective’s position for collaboration with traditional finance. At the same time, validators such as Google Cloud, Deutsche Telekom, and NTT Digital reinforce Injective’s enterprise and institution-friendly direction.

3. RWA Tokenization on Injective

So far, we have explored Injective’s scalability, infrastructure, and strategic partnerships, understanding why it is a blockchain specialized for RWA. Now, let’s take a look at the types of RWAs that have actually been tokenized on Injective.

3.1 Stablecoins & U.S. Treasuries

• Ondo USDY: USDY is a yield-bearing stablecoin issued by Ondo Finance, backed by short-term U.S. Treasuries and bank deposits. It was onboarded onto Injective in November 2023.

• Mountain USDM: USDM is a yield-bearing stablecoin issued by Mountain Protocol, backed by short-term U.S. Treasuries. It was introduced in July 2024 and is supported on Injective through a bridge as wUSDM.

• Paxos USDL: USDL is a yield-bearing stablecoin issued by Paxos International, backed by U.S. Treasuries and cash-equivalent assets. It was introduced in October 2024 and is supported as wUSDL via a bridge.

• Agora AUSD: AUSD is a yield-bearing stablecoin issued by Agora Finance, led by CEO Nick van Eck. It is collateralized by U.S. dollars, short-term U.S. Treasuries, and repurchase agreements. Assets are managed in collaboration with global asset managers such as VanEck and State Street. AUSD was introduced in October 2024.

3.2 Indexes & Stocks

• BlackRock BUIDL Index: BUIDL is one of the largest RWA assets, an on-chain money market fund issued by BlackRock in partnership with Securitize. Injective developed the BUIDL Index together with Stork. While BUIDL itself is pegged to one dollar, the BUIDL Index tracks the overall issuance volume of BUIDL. It was launched in September 2024.

• AI Index: Traded as AIX on Helix, the AI Index is a basket tracking stocks like NVIDIA and TSMC alongside Web3 tokens related to AI such as INJ, AI16Z, and VIRTUALS. It was launched in January 2025.

• TradFi Index: Traded as TRADFI on Helix, the TradFi Index tracks hundreds of major U.S. companies including Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and Goldman Sachs. It was launched in February 2025.

• Tradfi Tech Stock Index: The TradFi Tech Stock Index traded as TTI on Helix tracks the Nasdaq-100 index, which includes companies like Amazon, Google, Nvidia, and Tesla.

• iAssets: iAssets is a framework that enables efficient capital utilization without requiring overcollateralization for RWA tokenization. On Helix, single-stock trackers like iNVDA, iGOOGL, and iHOOD, as well as multi-stock indices like TTI, are actively traded under this framework.

3.3 Institutional Funds and Commodities

• Partnership with Libre: Libre is a platform jointly developed by WebN Group and Laser Digital, the digital asset subsidiary of Nomura. It provides RWA tokenization services in a regulatory-compliant manner for institutions and accredited investors, supporting multiple blockchains including Injective. Assets tokenized through Libre on Injective can utilize the network’s native RWA module functionalities. Current Libre RWA tokens available on Injective include Laser Digital’s Laser Carry Fund, BlackRock’s Money Market Fund, and Hamilton Lane’s SCOPE Senior Credit Fund.

• Commodities: Injective’s RWA ecosystem began expanding into commodities as of April 2025. It started with tokens tracking the prices of gold (XAU) and silver (XAG) and plans to expand into precious metals, energy, agricultural goods, and forex in the future.

3.4 Others

Source: Injective

Lastly, while it is not an RWA token directly on the Injective network, it is worth mentioning AINJ, an ETP based on Injective. AINJ is a product created by 21Shares that allows institutional investors to gain exposure to INJ through traditional financial markets and brokerages.

AINJ is listed on the Euronext Paris and Amsterdam stock exchanges and is available through major platforms like Interactive Brokers, Saxo Bank, Swissquote, and eToro. Interestingly, the underlying INJ assets in AINJ are staked, and the staking rewards are reinvested back into AINJ.

4. Conclusion

At a time when the U.S. government is adopting a more crypto-friendly stance and traditional financial institutions are actively entering the crypto market, Injective is putting full effort into expanding the RWA ecosystem both technologically and commercially.

On the technical side, Injective continuously improves scalability through network optimization and introduces specialized modules to facilitate seamless RWA transactions. On the business side, it actively onboards a wide variety of RWA tokens and partners with major enterprises and institutions through strategic validator onboarding.

In addition, Injective participates as a member of the Tokenized Asset Coalition, collaborating with other networks and financial institutions to advance the RWA sector. It has also joined the Blockchain Association, alongside Brevan Howard, Circle, Coinbase, and Pantera, to support the crypto-friendly policy shift in the U.S. government.

The RWA market is just getting started. While it is already growing rapidly, as regulatory frameworks mature and more financial institutions participate, it could create a market of unprecedented scale within crypto. It will be fascinating to see how Injective navigates this unfolding landscape.

For readers interested in learning more about Injective beyond RWA tokenization, we recommend checking out the recently published Four Pillars report, “Finance Meets Innovation, Injective.”