The RWA conversation matures at Hong Kong conference
Consensus Hong Kong 2026 felt different this year. I think the real-world asset tokenization discussion has moved past the initial hype phase. The pitch decks and vague promises have been replaced by actual disagreements about how to build this stuff. People are arguing about architecture, regulation, and what problems tokenization actually solves.
It’s interesting to see how the conversation has evolved. A year ago, everyone was talking about tokenization in abstract terms. Now, there are concrete implementations and competing visions. The disagreements aren’t about whether tokenization will happen, but about how it should happen.
Stablecoins as the first successful RWA
One point that kept coming up was that stablecoins are already successful real-world assets. CJ Fong from GSR put it bluntly during a panel: “The most successful RWA is $USDT.” That statement got me thinking about how we define these categories.
Paxos Labs co-founder Chunda McCain talked about their gold-backed token $PAXG seeing surging demand. They’ve got regulatory approvals in Singapore, Finland, and Abu Dhabi. It seems like stablecoins are expanding beyond just dollar pegs into commodities and treasuries.
Brian Mehler from Stable, a payment blockchain company, showed their $USDT Zero system that eliminates gas fees entirely. Send 100 $USDT, and 99.999 arrives. He compared the goal to Swift – users shouldn’t even know they’re on a blockchain.
Maybe the boundary between stablecoins and RWAs is becoming artificial. As stablecoins back themselves with T-bills and gold, and as RWA platforms settle in $USDC, these categories might be merging into a single tokenized finance layer.
The architecture debate: permissioned versus permissionless
The sharpest disagreement I saw came from Securitize and Ondo. They both tokenize assets, but their approaches are fundamentally different.
Securitize’s Graham Ferguson advocates for native token issuance under a permissioned framework. He argues that wrapper models – where existing off-chain assets get wrapped into on-chain tokens – create distance between the asset and investor. With BlackRock’s BUIDL fund passing $1 billion, he points to their track record of issuing securities directly on-chain with compliance built in.
Ondo takes the opposite approach. Min Lin from Ondo talked about permissionless wrappers that prioritize DeFi composability and global distribution. Their model integrates more quickly with existing DeFi protocols and removes gatekeepers, which they see as important for reaching Asian investors.
In a follow-up interview, Ferguson questioned whether wrapper models provide adequate investor protection. But the binary might already be outdated. Conflux CSO Forgiven described a hybrid case: renewable energy assets packaged by a financial company and wrapped into a DeFi protocol. It’s permissionless distribution of a regulated, real-world asset.
Settlement speed as the real advantage
If there was one claim repeated across different venues, it was that tokenization’s killer feature isn’t access or transparency – it’s speed.
Forgiven from Conflux offered a concrete benchmark: deposit $USDC, get immediate confirmation; request redemption, receive $USDC back within one hour. “Faster than T+0,” he noted, compared to traditional settlement cycles that can take days.
The composability argument extends this further. Multiple panelists noted that in traditional finance, buying an asset and using it as collateral immediately is structurally impossible. On-chain, it’s native functionality.
Mehler from Stable highlighted a practical issue: during recent market volatility, ETH gas price fluctuations doubled transaction costs for businesses moving stablecoins. His fixed-cost $USDT transfer model eliminates that variable, which matters for enterprises processing thousands of daily transactions.
Physical assets present real challenges
The precious metals session provided a reality check. Ronald Tan from Silver Times Limited walked through silver market logistics: warehouse costs, transportation challenges, and US-China export restrictions that don’t disappear when a token gets minted.
This shows the gap between financial RWAs and physical RWAs. Treasuries and fund shares can settle instantly because the underlying asset is already recorded in a ledger. Metals, energy, and real estate require verification that the physical asset exists and is properly custodied.
Paxos’s $PAXG experience – gold tokens backed by allocated bars in London vaults – shows it can work at scale. But McCain acknowledged they’re committing additional resources to meet surging demand. The infrastructure for physical-asset tokenization exists, but it’s far from simple.
Asia emerges as the center of RWA development
Across all sessions, Asia – and Hong Kong specifically – kept coming up as the gravitational center of RWA development.
Ondo is targeting Hong Kong, Singapore, and Japan for expansion. Securitize’s Ferguson said they’d prioritize jurisdictions with regulatory clarity, naming the same cities. Paxos already holds a Singapore MAS license. HashKey, as both event host and market participant, anchored multiple panels on Hong Kong’s positioning.
Forgiven described Conflux as a rare Chinese blockchain project using real names. Their renewable energy RWA product was designed specifically for the Hong Kong market.
The subtext seems clear: while US regulatory battles over stablecoin legislation continue, Asia is building the infrastructure and establishing precedents.
What’s actually at stake here? The RWA conversation has moved past whether tokenization will happen. The arguments now center on how – permissioned or permissionless, financial or physical, institutional or retail-first. The answers are diverging by asset class, jurisdiction, and business model.
The stablecoin-RWA convergence might be the most significant shift. If the most successful tokenized assets are stablecoins, and stablecoins are increasingly backed by real-world assets, the entire framing of RWA as a separate sector might not survive 2026.
