Government debt, then stocks, and finally oil
26.01.2026
In 2025, the RWA sector moved from conceptual discussions to a phase of aggressive integration into traditional markets. The primary focus shifted from simple debt instruments to energy resources and critical infrastructure.
In this new article, he analyzes the raw materials market architecture, examines key startup cases, and assesses the risks of the impending financial reality.
The evolution of tokenization
In late 2025, BlackRock CEOs Larry Fink and Rob Goldstein, in an essay for The Economist, described the intersection of traditional institutions and digital innovation as building a bridge from opposite sides of a river:
"These two sides aren't so much competing as learning to collaborate. In the future, people won't hold stocks and bonds in one portfolio and cryptocurrency in another. Assets of all types will one day be able to be bought, sold, and stored in a single digital wallet."
Last year, the RWA sector proved to be the most profitable in the crypto market. This success, fueled by predictions of a bright future for the tokenization of real-world assets and the rather bleak situation across the blockchain industry, made the sector literally the only hope for investors.
In October, Standard Chartered analysts estimated the RWA segment's market capitalization at $2 trillion by 2028. In December, Grayscale predicted the niche would grow 1,000-fold over the next four years.
ARK Invest has joined the trend and believes that tokenization could gain up to 50,000% in the next five years.
According to RWA.xyz, the sector's value excluding stablecoins surpassed $22 billion on January 22, 2026. US debt obligations led the tokenized asset segment at $9.5 billion.
While US Treasury bonds were the driving force at the start, startups are now digitizing collective ownership of private corporate loans and real estate.
Trading public company shares on "crypto rails" became a boom in 2025. Many major CEXs and DEXs have provided this opportunity. Furthermore, Telegram users now have the ability to buy TradFi market securities directly within the app.
The next vector of RWA development is shaping up around commodities. At the time of writing, the subcategory's market capitalization was $4.8 billion, of which over 80% was accounted for by Tether Gold (XAUT) and Paxos Gold (PAXG).
Although pioneers of gold, silver, and other precious metals tokenization, like Tether, have been working on this for over five years, oil hasn't been on their radar. Substantive discussions about digital rights to this asset only began about two years ago.
As regulatory clarity develops and the course towards total tokenization is set, the market for oil, gas, and important resources for the AI economy may join the RWA and even lead the trend in the near future.
Subsoil economics
Tokenization of mineral resources is an unobvious trend in the shadow of the broader RWA, not yet supported by any reporting figures, but already energized by pioneering companies. Early experiments with commodities have proven the feasibility of this technology, which can instantly pool liquidity in capital-intensive industries, bypassing banks that are struggling to meet the demands of the accelerating AI economy.
The tokenized commodities market has undergone a natural selection process. Elmnts, an early Solana startup offering a share of oil production revenues, is currently in withdrawal mode. The project's social media activity ceased four months after its public beta in October 2024.
Projects that had lost momentum, for various reasons, gave way to players with institutional backing and improved business models. Furthermore, in the current regulatory environment, under the protection of advanced laws in the US, EU, and UAE, organizations can gain tangible legal boundaries that the pioneers lacked.
Hadron, from USDT issuer Tether, offers turnkey tokenization using institutional-grade verification technology and a wide range of applications, including commodities.
The UAE-based company Tharwa (TRWA) operates in the Abu Dhabi financial center. The project targets Middle Eastern markets and tokenizes gold, real estate, and oil industry stakes. Integration with the decentralized Pendle protocol allows investors to separate and trade the underlying asset (Principal Token, PT) and the expected yield (Yield Token, YT), providing access to Sharia-compliant finance without riba.
Another RWA startup, Mineral Vault (MNRL), has chosen the specialized blockchain Plume Network, offering built-in compliance mechanisms at the protocol level.
The team is working on tokenizing royalties from 2,500+ active oil and gas wells in the US owned by partner Allegiance Oil & Gas. The owner of the Mineral Vault I token effectively owns a stake in the mineral rights worth a total of $10 million.
Mineral rights are a separate type of subsoil ownership that grant the owner rights to extract oil, gas, and other resources beneath a property, independent of surface rights.
Mineral rights can be leased to US energy companies that extract the resources in exchange for royalties paid to the rights holder. This structure allows owners to receive passive income, inflation protection, and long-term value appreciation, while bearing virtually no costs or risks associated with drilling or servicing wells.
The legal structure, built through bankruptcy-proof special-purpose entities, guarantees investors payments in the USDC stablecoin. The target yield, set at 10–12%, makes the asset competitive with traditional bonds.
On October 1, 2025, the team behind Zoniqx, a full-service tokenization startup, announced the launch of the "world's first tokenized private placement in the oil sector" based on the Hedera blockchain.
The project, developed with the support of One World Petroleum, combines the acquisition of proven oil-producing assets with secured lending to operators. Each stake is issued as a security token, guaranteeing automated regulatory compliance, investor verification, and full asset lifecycle management.
In the modern RWA sector, technical support for rights is achieved through the use of specially developed token standards:
Zoniqx's ERC-7518 is based on ERC-1155 but adds dynamic compliance. Unlike older versions, it is designed for cross-chain transfers, preserving all legal restrictions and owner data;
ERC-3643 is a smart token with built-in blacklists and whitelists, used by the industry leader, Ondo Finance. Before each transaction, the algorithm queries the oracle to confirm: "Has the buyer completed KYC? Are they sanctioned? Are they permitted to own this asset according to the laws of their country?" Otherwise, the transaction is automatically blocked.
ERC-1400 is one of the first and most flexible standards for tokenizing complex financial instruments. It supports collective asset ownership, the division of rights (e.g., into profit or management shares), the enforceable transfer of tokens by court order, and the attachment of legal documents to token metadata.
ERC-4626 is a standard for tokenized yield vaults that has become the foundation for many RWA funds, such as Ondo OUSG and BlackRock BUIDL. It unifies deposits, withdrawals, and yield calculations, simplifying their integration into DeFi as collateral assets.
The USOR (U.S. Oil Reserve) token on the Solana network stood out among real projects. In January 2026, it was actively discussed on social media due to rumors of BlackRock wallets and Donald Trump's family accumulating the asset. However, an Arkham Intelligence review and an audit of the project revealed no real ties to the US Department of Energy. The startup's description contains technical inaccuracies in its documentation and bears the hallmarks of a scam.
RWA has once again proven its importance not only for corporations, but also for the administration of the current US president.
On January 22, American Resources Corporation, through its subsidiary ReElement Technologies and blockchain infrastructure provider SAGINT, announced the successful launch of the world's first token for critical minerals. The project has confirmed its technical readiness to comply with the requirements of the US Defense Acquisition Regulations.
A utility token issued on the Sui blockchain ensures supply chain traceability for purified neodymium oxide produced at ReElement's Noblesville, Indiana, facility. It is designed as an internal audit and compliance tool for the ReElement platform and its clients, integrating data and compliance protocols.
Resource finance
The tokenization of physical assets on the blockchain is generating new financial instruments and accelerating the migration of traditional finance to crypto infrastructure. The synergy between the two systems is already evident.
As Messari analysts noted in their report, The Crypto Theses 2026, the answer to the limitations of traditional banking was the emergence of InfraFi—a breakthrough at the intersection of RWA and DePIN.
Until 2025, most attempts at private on-chain lending suffered from so-called "toxic flow" and adverse selection. The Goldfinch protocol is illustrative: originally conceived as a tool for efficiently providing loans to emerging markets, it ran into underwriting issues. As a result, the best borrowers defected to traditional lenders, leaving on-chain pools with the riskiest assets. By 2026, the focus shifted from debt refinancing to the creation of new assets: the tokenization of infrastructure (GPUs, energy) secured by real assets, where revenue is generated through use, not speculation.
Messari coined the term to describe the combination of on-chain capital and real-world infrastructure lending, where returns are uncorrelated with cryptocurrency volatility. The focus is on productive assets and equipment that generate predictable cash flow and remain outside the reach of traditional capital markets due to fragmented demand.
Transforming computing power into a productive resource in its own right for the future AI economy was the starting point for the startup USD.AI. Traditional private lending funds ignore the small and medium-sized AI enterprise segment. Their requests typically start at $20 million for hyperscalers like CoreWeave. AI startups seeking six-figure sums to purchase GPUs find themselves in a financial vacuum.
USD.AI solves this problem through a combination of frameworks. The key innovation is eliminating the need for physical hardware ownership by the borrower:
hosting - GPUs are delivered directly to a third-party data center;
rights of use - the borrower receives the legal right to operate the production facilities, but not the right of ownership - until the three-year loan is fully repaid;
Liquidation—in the event of default, instead of legal recovery, access rights to computing resources are transferred, which can be implemented through on-chain governance mechanisms. Access to the GPUs is reassigned to a new tenant. This turns the graphics cards into reusable, income-generating assets that can be used through multiple credit cycles without physical transfer.
A parallel model is emerging in the energy sector through the DePIN project Daylight. Distributed energy resources, such as solar panels and home batteries, have much in common with GPUs: high capital costs at the start and predictable cash flows in the future.
Daylight allows users to invest in hardware installations and earn income from real-time energy generation. In 2026, the intersection of energy and computing has become a strategic frontier: computing derivatives now often include hedging against risks—both electricity prices and GPU availability.
Reliable connectivity between on-chain systems and real-world assets and processes is critical to the operation of InfraFi. This is where blockchain oracles like Chainlink and Python come into play.
The convergence of the on-chain and off-chain worlds requires large-scale and continuous data flows, which significantly increases the practical value of the corresponding protocols and their tokens. The segment's undervaluation suggests a future rally, as it becomes the basic computational layer for the new economy, as confirmed by recent news.
Oracle provider Chainlink has launched 24/5 U.S. Equities Streams, a product that provides DeFi protocols with 24/7 U.S. stock and ETF feeds on weekdays.
As market structure becomes more complex, indices and derivatives are becoming dominant instruments. As Messari notes, computing (GPU hours) has become the new commodity. However, computing markets are fragmented and opaque. Prices vary depending on chip type (H100 vs. A100), geography, and contract duration.
Projects like Ornn and Global Compute Index create a "gold standard" for computing power pricing by aggregating data from around the world.
Squaretower has launched GPU futures, allowing AI labs to lock in their operating costs while protecting against chip shortages.
The transparency of ledgers necessary for market advantage becomes an Achilles' heel for storing large fortunes. The public visibility of a wallet that owns a significant stake in oil rigs or GPU farms makes it a target. ZKP mechanisms, which allow ownership to be verified without revealing balances, may be the answer.
PoW blockchains are the most promising for securing rights to strategic assets, but in the RWA segment, the approach to creating specialized networks still prevails. Due to a limited set of scenarios and participants, less economic diversification, and a concentration of trust points, these networks are potentially of increased interest to hackers.
It's also worth remembering: blockchain protects the ownership record, not the physical asset itself. In the event of nationalization or destruction of a tokenized asset, such as an oil rig, the token becomes a claim against an insurance company or the state. The effectiveness of RWAs here directly depends on the stability of the jurisdiction.