🤝 Security Token Prime Insights: 1/20/2025

Exclusive Intelligence for Security Token Prime Members

January 20, 2025

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Summary and Key Takeaways

1. Hamilton Lane Taps Republic to Target Retail Investor Segment

Publicly going on Bloomberg to share the strategy, Co-CEO of Hamilton Lane, Eric Hirsch clearly states the importance of target investors where they live. In this case, that’s retail investors that live on Republic who as a company has always had great success reaching retail investors with their crowdfunding platform. We can expect the first offering in the first half of the year according to the release. What are the chances it's their SCOPE product given it’s already been tokenized in the past?

2. Tradable Brings 30 New Private Credit Products Representing $1.7 Billion to ZKsync

You read that right, almost $2 Billion came on chain seemingly overnight. Tradable out of Chicago has brought to the market thirty different private credit investment products in the form of private bonds. The underlying chain ZKSync is excited about the big move as it puts them on the map as a big mover in the space, even though it still puts them far behind the actual bond market figures which can be found at STM.co, totaling nearly $20 Billion! This move by Tradable highlights exactly how easy it will be for the RWA market cap to grow as more firms look to bring large volumes on chain.

3. Brickken Secures $2.5M in Funding to Fuel Growth

Brickken is the BNB chain poster child that’s now successfully attracted the seven figure investment a startup needs to enter the next phase. According to our interview with the CEO Edwin Manta from Friday last week, they plan to use the funding to expand their media activities, grow the team, and expand their geographies and enterprise solutions. Prominent investors include Blue Bay Ventures, SNZ Capital, Hodl Ventures, Mocha, Psalion, and the Ergodic Fund. Don’t miss out on the interesting conversation around AI agents and tokenization with Edwin either! 

4. Northern Trust’s Matrix Zenith Continues to Make Moves

Through the fixed-income workstream of Project Guardian, the National University of Singapore and UOB are using Northern Trust’s Matrix Zenith platform for on-chain reporting of their green bond. The idea is that the token holds environmental reporting data related to the green bond issued in 2023 and no matter who holds the bond, the token (and all the information tied to it) goes with it. UOB will gather feedback from investors on how this helps with reporting requirements, however the immutability and transparency themselves should prove useful in seeing the use of funds and tracking progress towards sustainability goals. Tokenizing this data could become a new industry best practice which Northern Trust is well positioned to service given the platform they’ve built out and focus on this area.

5. IX Swap Taps LINE Messenger App for Access to Nearly 200M Users

Using the Kaia blockchain and in collaboration with LINE NEXT, IX Swap is delivering RWAs via mobile to hundreds of millions of potential users in Asia, 97 million of which are in Japan. This could be one of the largest built in distribution channels for RWAs to ever be developed, though it's unclear exactly how the partnership will work. This highlights the power digital distribution of RWA products that wasn’t before possible in traditional finance and IX Swap is stress testing this thesis with LINE.

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

Did you have a chance to read our December 2024 market update last week? This is our monthly report covering market activity across the 700+ tokenized RWAs we track, which closed the year at over $50B in market cap. Here’s an asset class breakdown as a sneak peak of what you can find inside.

Asset-Backed Securities

  • Market Cap: $11,716,996,951 (-0.04% MoM)

  • Volume: $462,762 (32.65% MoM)

Asset-backed securities were mostly stable this past month, with just a .04% in market cap. There were no new securitizations in December from Redwood Trust which is an anomaly as most months have at least one. Overall the decrease in market cap comes from Republic Note (-25%) and $HAG (-8.45%) through December. Other smaller drops included the Backed High Yield Corporate Bond (-1.76%) and Blockstream ASIC Note (-2.95%). Although their individual reduced market caps are in bigger percentages, they weren’t enough to drop the market cap of the whole asset class by as much.

Volume on the other hand did increase significantly by 32.65%, largely driven by $INX (57.1%) and Republic $NOTE (45.61%). Although INX is an ABS due to its revenue-sharing nature, it does behave much like an equity token as major volume was experienced right after announcing their new “Buy Assets” feature. This is meant to make trading a more seamless experience for retail investors. 

Redwood Trust Securitizations Using LiquidFi

For more data insights and charts, visit STM.Co 

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Hello readers,

What does Trump’s memecoin mean for the industry? In my opinion it’s the best thing ever and highlights what type of market we’re headed into. I also think it puts further validity to the rumor that Trump may introduce no capital gains on US-based cryptocurrencies. This would be the final straw needed to enable a golden era of crypto markets this cycle, one that may be the greatest we will ever see! It would certainly be good for $WALLY, $ONDO (which was a Crypto Ball sponsor), and many other RWA governance tokens too. 

Trump did the most American thing ever and whether you like it or not, he highlighted the power of memecoins in which a token can explode overnight to billions in market cap (a big win for Solana too!). It absolutely will all parlay into benefiting the RWA industry.

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)

Company of the Week - Herwig: Tradable
Company of the Week - Kyle: Sygnum

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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