September was a busy month with RWA Summit, KBW, and Token2049 back-to-back. One point is clear: tokenized securities are here to stay, and the questions revolve around “how” and “when” instead of “what” and “why.”

Below are five takeaways and what they signal for the next year.

Defi’s Utility is Undercounted Because the Best Infrastructure Runs Quietly

Markets still miss what happens when tokenized assets actually work onchain. The practical benefits today are access and programmability for onchain investors:  24/7 settlement windows, access to new securities onchain, clear data, and faster reconciliation.

DeFi connectivity is being solved for RWAs. Different designs are emerging to connect institutional assets with onchain liquidity:

• Horizon takes a permissioned assets, permissionless access path in a blue-chip market.
• Pendle supports permissioned or permissionless structures through yield/option primitives.
• Centrifuge uses a wrapped token on professional fund shares (deRWA) to provide optionality. 

Under the hood, standards like ERC-4626 and ERC-7540 anchor these flows. In our case, 4626 handles real-time vault accounting and 7540 handles queued subscriptions and redemptions, so instruments behave like software while meeting institutional requirements. These standards make RWAs composable enabling liquidity and risk management across protocols.

Once RWAs are composable, they stop being a “category” and become a feature of onchain capital markets.

“Crypto is Fintech” is Now Table Stakes

Across recent RWA gatherings the shift was the same: blockchain is moving to the background. Payment rails, stablecoins, neobanks, and cards are shipping consumer distribution while the chain does the work under the hood. Users want outcomes, not mechani

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Author: Graham Nelson