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 🌱 Real-world growth

The holidays are the perfect time to reminisce on the year that was and, of course, look ahead to the next six years. I mean, how else do you survive your turkey coma?

Speaking of predictions for 2030, ParaFi had some fascinating callouts in the most recent episode of the Empire podcast. Two stood out to me, and I wanted to talk more about them so get comfortable in your stretchy pants.

The first was that tokenized real-world assets will outpace the overall value of digital assets. 

Excluding stablecoins, total RWA value has topped nearly $13.5 billion.  

The total crypto market cap right now sits around $3.4 trillion, so RWA’s not ready to eat cryptos lunch just yet but, as ParaFi’s Ben Forman pointed out, we’ve seen RWAs jump in value, growing way over 50% in the past 12 months alone. 

The financial sector — stop me if you’ve heard this one before — is outdated. 

“We still don’t have … an Amazon experience for finance,” Forman said. 

So the opportunity to revamp the financial systems is ripe for the picking.

“The beauty of tokenization is that when you have assets on a blockchain, you can program logic into the actual asset itself. This reduces the need for lawyers for administrators for trustees, and it also opens up a whole host of other AI agent use cases where micro payments can be enabled,” Forman said. 

Right now, the biggest winners in the space are tokenized treasuries, which make up 62% of the whole pie. 

But you can’t talk about RWA tokenization without also addressing stablecoins. If you combine the two, according to rwa.xyz, you get a combined market cap of nearly $200 billion.

ParaFi thinks that, by 2030, we could see the stablecoin supply reach 10% of M2 money supply in the US. 

Similarly to their RWA prediction, there’s a way to go for stablecoins until they hit 10%. Right now, they barely make up 1% with M2 coming in at $21 trillion.

There are three reasons for ParaFi’s thinking here: Stablecoins have evolved as a new form of payment rails across the world. 

Then you have the potential for fintech companies to add in stablecoins because they’re not burdened by the legacy operating systems of older firms. So there’s potential to see a new business model of yield-bearing reserves to back stablecoins, ParaFi’s Kevin Yedid-Botton noted. 

A Delphi Digital report from earlier this week found that weekly stablecoin transfer volume is at 302 billion, an increase of 235% year to date. 

“Stablecoins have found product-market fit and are enabling a more global digital economy,” the report said.

It’s hard not to be bullish about these two predictions. 

— Katherine Ross

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• The SEC’s leadership team could look very different in January as President-elect Donald Trump officially takes office.

DAS NYC: Where Industry Titans Shape the Future

Digital assets are evolving — are you ready to lead?

Join the top institutional minds in crypto this March in New York City. From regulation to real-world adoption, DAS is where ideas turn into action and the next era of finance begins.

Q: Will crypto bring the financial sector out of the dark ages? 

I think it might take longer than we want to admit (old dogs, new tricks after all) but yes. 

The opportunity for blockchain to enhance and speed up — and even remake — parts of the traditional financial sector is all there. It’s just about actually implementing it. 

Having something like regulatory clarity will take away the excuses for not making the updates, but we’ll need to see institutions really invest in the updates themselves before this dream becomes a reality.

— Katherine Ross