𝙈𝙖𝙧𝙞𝙖🗽

I love what I do. I get to spend my days on things others call a hobby. But sometimes this industry gets on my nerves. Not the work, but how we sell it. We talk a ton about getting more issuances on-chain. Hardly anyone stops to ask if it even makes sense for that issuer and that asset. The other thing is how some providers along the asset lifecycle show up. Not all of them, of course. But the loudest are often the ones distracting most from the fact that they don’t know how issuers from the traditional world work. The volume of your so-called “partner chain” doesn’t matter to an issuer. Everyone wants the biggest RWA number, but nobody counts the same way. Some count target volumes that never get subscribed, some add completely unregulated assets that somehow fit the narrative. The biggest number wins, because it’s the easiest one to market. Louder, bigger, sexier. And even an honest number says little. Most of it comes from tokenized money market funds, treasuries and gold. That says a lot about the distribution power of BlackRock or Franklin Templeton. It says very little about what a family business can expect from its own issuance. Same goes for DeFi. Lending and borrowing work when there’s a liquid market behind an asset. That’s why tokenized treasuries and money market funds are already used as collateral. For a typical private market bond, that market doesn’t exist yet, and licensed secondary venues for tokenized securities are still rare. Without a successful placement and a working market, all those protocol partnerships don’t help a traditional issuer. Think of a third-generation family real estate company. They manage, build and revitalize properties, and a bond is one way they want to finance their next project. Their investors are traditional. They pay in fiat, don’t have a wallet and don’t want to sign things multiple times, certainly not through tools like Privy. They just want to put their money to work, without any hurdles. Of course, a custody provider still has to be part of the setup, but the investors never feel it. Sounds strange, but that’s how it is. What the issuer expects is what it knows from traditional financing: people to talk to, partners who understand its business, predictable costs, digitalization and automation where it actually makes sense, and someone who stays for the security’s entire lifetime. No fancy DeFi pitch. No stories about what might be possible in a couple of years or in some regulatory gray zone. The chain, custody, the registrar, the liability umbrella, the payment provider, the on-chain cash leg: all of that should work together quietly in the background. What counts is whether the partner understands the business and helps it reach its goal, instead of building a silo solution that leaves it on its own. So before we talk about getting more issuances on-chain, let’s ask if it even makes sense for that issuer and that asset. That’s where the conversation should start.

Listened to the conversation between Chancellor @bundeskanzler and @nvidia CEO @JensenHuang yesterday. It was mostly about AI, but this line fits tokenization just as well: 'There's nothing to regulate if the industry doesn't thrive.' You can see this clearly with secondary markets for tokenized assets in Germany and Europe. Licensing costs can run into the millions, and approval processes can take years, all before the first transaction happens. Startups can't afford that. Only large incumbents can enter, and being able to afford a license doesn't mean building the best product. Innovation needs space to grow: within a controlled framework, yes, but a more open one. I'm for clear guidelines and strong consumer protection. But clear rules should enable a market, not precede it. Give builders legal certainty, let the market get going, then refine where needed. Otherwise there's nothing left to protect, and Europe falls behind regions that offered clarity and more openness.

I've been working in the regulated tokenization market for a few years now, mostly in DACH, and the region is bigger than most people think. In Germany alone, 278 tokenized securities worth around €1.3 billion have been issued under the eWpG, according to @DekaBank's Digital Asset Monitor. So why does hardly anyone know? Because the data is spread across more than ten registrars, each with its own website. Some details sit in CSV files nobody can really work with, others aren't public at all. As a result, issuers don't get the visibility their issuances need, and investors have no single place to find them, compare them and decide based on actual data, on-chain and off-chain. So I built @emittodigital, a comparison platform for tokenized issuances from Germany, Austria and Switzerland. It's updated hourly and lets you discover and compare issuances from across the region and calculate their returns over the full term. Most of this data you won't find on rwa.xyz or similar trackers. Want a closer look at the DACH tokenization market? Early access is open now, link in the reply. Public access follows in a few weeks. emitto is not a secondary market and no subscriptions take place on the platform.