- RockawayX, a $2 billion digital-asset investment firm, is committing $150 million to Catapult, a programme providing venture funding, product structuring, liquidity, market making and distribution for tokenized credit products. It already runs venture funds, a market-neutral fund supplying liquidity to DeFi protocols and a vault business with roughly $300 million deployed, and acquired crypto hedge fund Relayer in August.
- Tokenized real-world assets including bonds, equities and funds total roughly $38 billion, but more than half of that is tokenized money-market funds, according to RWA.xyz. The genuinely difficult assets remain largely untokenized.
- RockawayX expects the market to reach between $10 trillion and $20 trillion by 2030, against a Citi base case of $5.5 trillion by the end of the decade. Its forecast is roughly two to four times the bank estimate.
- Chief executive Viktor Fischer said the firm thesis is that after trading, yield becomes the largest onchain use case, requiring new sources of return of 12% or more that are uncorrelated to crypto. Catapult will target trade and supply-chain finance, specialty asset-backed securities, CLOs and real-estate-related credit.
What Happened?
Fischer said the appeal of putting less liquid assets onchain is that market makers can create an exit even when the underlying investment carries lengthy redemption periods. RockawayX is recruiting traditional finance professionals who can originate and underwrite these assets and pairing them with crypto-native operators to structure and distribute onchain. As Fischer put it, the hard part of real-world assets was never tokenization but everything after it: who buys the asset, where it trades and what happens when someone needs to get out.
Why It Matters?
Fischer own description of the model contains the risk that matters most. Using market makers to create exits for assets with long redemption periods is liquidity transformation, the practice of offering holders quicker access than the underlying assets can actually provide. It works while market makers are willing to hold inventory and fails precisely when everyone wants out at once, which is the mechanism that forced open-ended property funds to gate redemptions and that has repeatedly caught investors who believed a wrapper had changed the liquidity of what was inside it. Tokenization does not make a three-year trade finance receivable into a daily-liquidity asset; it moves the mismatch onto a market maker balance sheet. Anyone evaluating these products should ask what happens to that market maker in a stress period. The composition of the existing market reinforces the point. More than half of the $38 billion already onchain is tokenized money-market funds, meaning the market has so far captured the most liquid, most standardised and lowest-yielding instruments available. Catapult targets the opposite end, CLOs, specialty asset-backed and real-estate credit, which is where the operational and credit work is genuinely hard. The forecast gap deserves plain treatment too: RockawayX projects two to four times what Citi analysts do, and RockawayX has $150 million riding on its number. Interested parties produce optimistic forecasts, and a 12% uncorrelated yield target generally implies subordinated or specialty risk rather than a free lunch discovered in a new venue.
What Next?
Watch which asset classes Catapult actually brings onchain first, since trade finance and CLOs differ enormously in transparency and the sequence will show whether the programme starts with genuinely difficult assets or with the easier end. The measure of progress is the composition of the $38 billion market rather than its size: if the money-market fund share falls meaningfully, real diversification is happening. Track whether tokenized credit products publish redemption terms and market-maker commitments, because that disclosure determines whether the liquidity promise is contractual or merely expected. European supervision is a live constraint, with ESMA making tokenization a priority from 2027 and the ECB pushing to restrict yield-bearing crypto products. The first stress episode in a tokenized credit vehicle will be far more informative than any forecast, and given typical private credit maturities that test is unlikely to arrive quickly.
Affected Tickers and Coins: BLK, ARES, APO, C
Source: CoinDesk
