RWA Inc’s Kevin Yunai Says Platforms Must Build Liquidity to Unlock $320 Billion RWA Market

Real-world asset tokenization has moved beyond the question of whether assets can be brought onchain. According to RWA Inc founder and CEO Kevin Yunai, the next challenge is turning those assets into liquid, compliant, and productive financial instruments.

“Simple tokenization is putting an asset representation onchain,” Yunai said. “Productive onchain finance is when that asset becomes usable: tradable, financeable, pledgeable, composable, transparent, and connected to real economic yield.”

“Tokenization alone is not the innovation,” he said. “The innovation is turning real-world assets into programmable financial instruments with fixed supply.”

Many tokenized assets exist today, but relatively few are meaningfully liquid. Yunai believes this is because the market has over-indexed on issuance platforms while underbuilding the infrastructure needed to support active, trusted markets.

“The industry needs more than issuance platforms,” he said. “It needs full market infrastructure.”

That infrastructure includes regulated secondary markets, reliable market makers, standardized disclosures, trusted custody, verified pricing, interoperable compliance, identity layers, institutional settlement, and clear redemption mechanics.

This balance is critical. A tokenized asset only has value if the token is connected to a clearly defined economic or ownership right. That right must be supported by legal documentation, asset custody, investor eligibility rules, transfer restrictions, reporting obligations, and redemption procedures.

In other words, the token cannot float separately from the real-world asset it represents. The legal structure has to be enforceable. The asset has to be verifiable. The investor’s rights have to be clear.

A common argument for tokenization is that it will make traditionally illiquid assets easier to trade. Yunai believes this is true but incomplete. The first benefit is access.

Before tokenization, many investors were locked out of private assets because of geography, regulation, high minimum investment sizes, banking limitations, or intermediary control. Tokenization can reduce some of those barriers by making participation more efficient, fractional, and globally accessible.

The larger promise of tokenization, then, is not simply that investors may be able to sell assets more easily. It is that more investors may be able to participate in opportunities that were previously unavailable to them.

Yunai believes the market needs clear standards around asset verification, custody, legal enforceability, valuation, disclosures, audits, compliance, KYC and AML controls, transfer restrictions, redemption rights, and ongoing reporting.

The goal is comparability. Institutions need to be able to evaluate tokenized assets in the same disciplined way they evaluate traditional financial products. They need to know what they own, who controls the asset, how cash flows are handled, what happens in default, how disputes are resolved, and how information is reported over time.

That means the winners will not necessarily be the companies that tokenize the most assets. Issuance is only one part of the market. The more defensible opportunity is building trusted financial networks around tokenized assets.

These networks need to connect asset originators, investors, custodians, compliance systems, pricing data, market venues, and reporting infrastructure. They also need to provide confidence that the tokenized asset is real, enforceable, compliant, and usable.

Long term, Yunai believes investors should also capture meaningful value. If tokenization works as intended, it should reduce friction, increase transparency, lower access barriers, and open the door to higher-quality opportunities.

The real prize is not tokenizing assets for the sake of tokenization. It is building more efficient markets around them.

“Success is not only trillions of dollars tokenized,” he said. “That number will come if the infrastructure is built correctly.”

A more meaningful sign of progress would be deep secondary markets, institutional-grade standards, global investor access, transparent reporting, and tokenized assets becoming part of everyday financial infrastructure.

That vision requires the industry to move beyond basic issuance. It needs market depth, legal clarity, investor protections, trusted infrastructure, and assets that produce real economic value.

“The goal is not just to tokenize the old financial system,” Yunai said. “The goal is to build a better one.”