🤝 Security Token Prime Insights: 1/13/2025

Exclusive Intelligence for Security Token Prime Members

January 13, 2025

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Summary and Key Takeaways

1. MANTRA Signs Up Another $1 Billion in Real Estate for 2025 in the UAE

MANTRA Chain is growing its RWA pipeline quickly with the $500 million from MAG Group and now $1 billion coming from DAMAC Group. This group focuses on UAE real estate including hospitality & data centers and it’ll be interesting to see which assets get tokenized. President-Elect Donald Trump also announced last week that DAMAC will be investing $20B in US data centers across the Midwest and Sunbelt regions… could any of those be tokenized? We’ll have to wait and see. Regardless, breaking a billion in commitments from a single issuer is a milestone in and of itself, which we expect to see a whole lot more of in 2025. TradFi firms are starting to understand the value-add blockchain brings to the table and it’s starting to reflect with commitments such as this. 

STM predicts $8 trillion in tokenized real estate by 2030, from the over $30 billion we see today across over 1,000+ existing tokens and announced deals. Whether for alternative financing, increased utility to the assets via DeFi, broader investor access for funds, making title transfer easier, or simply a liquidity option, there are various reasons why large asset owners will be bringing their real estate on-chain. This announcement is a great way to kick off the year and we’re excited to see more like this throughout the year.

2. Superstate $USCC Vault Hits the Market

Superstate has upgraded their infrastructure and completed their first DeFi integration! Steakhouse Financial has created their USDC RWA Vault on Morpho, where borrowers can now use their Superstate Crypto Carry Fund (USCC) tokens as collateral against the USDC they need. We saw $2M in deposits on January 8th and have already seen another $300K come in in the last 4 days. 

While we’ve seen liquidity products be used for posting margin, this helps illustrate how non-liquidity products can also be used as collateral, but for individual loans just as we’ve seen real estate do in the past. For anyone unaware, the USCC fund offers Qualified Purchasers access to crypto basis (differential between the spot and future price) strategies. We expect to see an influx of vaults supporting these kinds of assets, whether for direct USDC like this one or a DeFi-friendly stablecoin like Hamilton Lane’s SCOPE fund now has with Elixir’s deUSD.

3. Singaporean OCBC Launches Customizable Tokenized Corporate Bond in Region

Bonds are coming on-chain every month, especially at institutional levels. One of the main themes throughout 2024 was how the bonds settle (wholesale CBDC, fiat, etc.) as we saw through the ECB trials. This year is kicking off with something more bespoke… Customized corporate bonds from OCBC. 

Aside from fractionalizing bonds from S$250K to S$1K, the Singaporean bank is allowing corporate investors to select their coupon and duration, according to Ledger Insights, which the token represents. This means each investor will programmatically receive their respective coupon payments, with a lot less calculation and hassle in the back and middle office. The customizability is a lot easier to do, for a larger quantity of investors, thanks to the blockchain… That’s powerful.

4. Sologenic Announces Mike McCluskey as New CEO

What better time to change leadership than the beginning of the year? The Sologenic Development Foundation has appointed Mike McCluskey as their new CEO - promotion from his previous role as Head of Strategic Partnerships. Sologenic is building an ecosystem for tokenized RWAs on XRP Ledger including their tokenization platform and decentralized order book DEX.

This is a good time for this transition as we evolve to the next phase of adoption in this sector, especially given Mike’s 8 years at Fidelity, giving him insight into what institutional prospects would need in terms of functionality. McCluskey is poised to bring Sologenic to new levels with institutional interest in RWAs rising and Sologenic now entering the US market with their SoloTex solution in partnership with Texture Capital. Congratulations to Mike and we look forward to all he’ll accomplish!

5. Dusk Mainnet Goes Live After 6 Years

This week’s final highlight goes to Dusk which embodies resilience in this space. After 6 years of building the Dusk team has finally launched their mainnet, where people can support by operating a node, staking DUSK, and of course build on it. The privacy-focused L1 blockchain doesn’t stop there, with Q1 goals including Dusk Pay (electronic money token), their Lightspeed L2, and RWA tokenization through their Zedger Beta platform. Zero-knowledge proofs and confidentiality will be an interesting part of this whole ecosystem, given that TradFi may want to protect their trades and overall activity.

Notable Market Headlines

Institutional Activity

New Report Now Available

STM is proud to release a comprehensive report on tokenized real estate, highlighting over $30 Billion worth!

Take a read as we break down the current market size, various use cases, growth over the last 5 years, lessons from failed offerings, and ultimately where STM predicts the tokenized real estate market to be by 2030.

STM Data

We’ve been covering liquidity products a lot lately considering how much they’re moving the tokenization space, however it’s important to remember other asset classes too and their activity. These are assets we ultimately want to see more of as they represent equities, funds, real estate, and more across capital markets. Here are the top 10 assets by volume, excluding liquidity products.

For more data insights and charts, visit STM.Co 

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Hello readers,

In case you haven’t been watching the show or staying up to date with our research, I’ll share some key trends for the year one last time.

Key Trend #1 - stables and yield coins will continue to explode! Stablecoins will continue to grow in size, my prediction being 2.5x from $200 Billion. The difference this year is that instead of stablecoins being backed by less than 2% of onchain reserves by tokenized money market funds and treasuries, it will shoot up to 50-80% and we will see hundreds of billions of in flows into these categories this year.

Key Trend #2 - the new presidential administration is forcing all traditional finance players to reconsider tokenization and its new accelerated timeline thanks to the potential ease of regulation, having an SEC chair that has experience advising RWA firms, and the removal of the stigma that was attached to crypto since SBF. Even firms like Coinbase are now willing to tweet things like endorsing seeing $COIN public stock live on base.

Key Trend #3 - DeFi comes to RWAs with new vaults. The big unlock for tokenized assets of ALL kinds is not the ability to trade but to collateralize. New DeFi solutions and vaults are going to continue to hit the market and lead to massive inflows of capital as we’ve recently seen with Hashnote’s $USYC which is now close to surpassing $2B in total size! You’ll see folks bring in traditional real world yield and marry it with new crypto contraptions that can let you take 4% to 20% (as recently seen with BUIDL for example). DeFi is about to evolve thanks to RWAs and it won’t be slow in any manner. 

With $250 Billion in RWAs (80% stablecoins) to start the year, I predict that we will surpass more than $1 Trillion in RWAs or close to it thanks to continued growth in stablecoins, market euphoria and improved regulation, combined with unlocking DeFi for RWAs using vaults. 

Happy tokenizing,
Herwig “Happy” Konings
CEO, Security Token Group 
Follow me on X / LinkedIn

Events

Recent Recordings

  • (NEW) AI In Digital Assets Marketing and PR with Rob Gonda (Recording Link)

  • Navigating PR Between TradFi and Web3 Media with Amsterdam Group (Recording Link)

  • Beyond the Hype: Cracking the Code of Successful Asset Tokenization with BlockInvest and Polygon (Recording Link)

  • Risk Management in Tokenized Assets with Moody's and Particula (Recording Link)

  • Blockchain Meets Construction with Inveniam & LV8R Labs (Recording Link)

  • Non-Performing Loans with BlockInvest and Davis & Morgan (Recording Link)

  • Issuer Spotlight: Tuscany National Token (Recording Link)

  • Platform Spotlight: Block Time Financial (Recording Link)

  • The TradFi/DeFi Hybrid with Maple, Centrifuge and Swarm (Recording Link)

  • Platform Spotlight: REtokens' New Platform with Tyler Vinson and David Kirschbaum (Recording Link)

  • Powers Hour: New SEC “Dealer” Rule Expansion and DeFi Impacts (Recording Link)

Every week Herwig and Kyle pick the company each of them feel made the most impact in the tokenization industry. Winning Company of the Week gives them an entry toward Company of the Year which in 2024 there were a plethora of options. But there can only be one. Who won Company of the Year 2024? Watch the show to find out!

Find out why and more every Friday live around 2pm EST on LinkedIn or X/ Twitter. Past episodes available on Youtube or your favorite podcast platform! 

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