Real-world asset (RWA) tokenization is often framed as a trillion-dollar opportunity. But according to industry leaders speaking at a recent BeInCrypto X Space, the biggest barrier to scale is not demand or technological capability — it is how institutional players assess failure risk in a fragmented, crosschain environment.
The discussion took place under the umbrella of BeInCrypto’s Online Summit 2026, as part of a broader program examining the infrastructure challenges facing digital finance. The panel was hosted in general partnership with 8lends, with a focus on how RWAs can move from experimental deployments to institutional-scale adoption.
While tokenized yield products are already attracting meaningful on-chain capital, speakers agreed that broader institutional participation will depend on whether interoperability frameworks can deliver predictable outcomes when systems fail — not just when they work as intended.
SponsoredIndustry Leaders Weigh In on RWA Infrastructure
The panel featured Alex Zinder (CPO of Blockdaemon), Graham Nelson ( DeFi Product Lead at Centrifuge), Aravindh Kumar (Business Lead at Avail), Aishwary Gupta (Global Head of Payments and RWAs at Polygon Labs), and Ivan Marchena (Chief Communications Officer at 8lends), bringing together perspectives from infrastructure providers, RWA platforms, and cross-chain specialists.
Across the discussion, panelists returned to a consistent theme: crypto-native tooling has advanced quickly, but institutional finance evaluates risk through a very different lens.
Institutions Ask “How Does It Fail?” — Not “Does It Work?”
One of the clearest distinctions raised during the Space was how institutions assess new financial infrastructure.
“Institutional adoption is not driven by hype,” said Alex Zinder, CPO of Blockdaemon. “Institutions don’t ask, ‘does it work?’ They ask, ‘can it fail — and if so, how badly?’”
That question becomes especially important in a multi-chain RWA environment. While crosschain rails now move stablecoins and crypto assets efficiently, institutions require clarity on governance, accountability, and recovery paths when failures occur.
“The opportunity is not removal of fragmentation,” Zinder added. “The thing we need to solve for is interoperability — and making that inherent in the design.”
Fragmentation Acts Like an Economic Drag
Fragmentation across blockchains was described as more than a temporary inconvenience.
Sponsored Sponsored“Fragmentation is not a technical problem,” said Ivan Marchena, CCO at 8lends. “It’s an economic tax.”
According to Marchena, when tokenized assets are spread across blockchains that do not seamlessly interoperate, liquidity becomes siloed, pricing diverges, and capital efficiency suffers. Even if RWAs reach trillion-dollar scale, fragmentation could materially limit their effectiveness.
Several speakers emphasized that fragmentation itself is unlikely to disappear. Instead, winning platforms will be those that hide it from end users — much like the internet relies on standardized protocols rather than a single network.
Polygon: Institutions Want Risk Offloaded, Not More Complexity
From Polygon’s perspective, the challenge is not just interoperability, but how execution risk is handled.
Aishwary Gupta of Polygon Labs pointed to intent-based architectures as one way institutions can engage without taking on full execution risk themselves.
Sponsored“Institutional users want a counterparty that can offload execution risk,” he said. “With intent-based systems, they can specify outcomes, while specialized solvers handle routing and sourcing liquidity across venues.”
Gupta added that this approach allows institutions to access public blockchain liquidity while maintaining controls around compliance, data localization, and settlement guarantees — factors that often slow pilots when institutions rely solely on public infrastructure.
Yield Products Are Scaling First — Not Real Estate
Despite structural hurdles, the panel agreed that RWA adoption is already happening in specific areas. Yield-bearing products — particularly tokenized Treasuries, money market instruments, and private credit — are currently leading onchain adoption.
“Today we see huge demand for products like treasury bills, money markets, and private credit,” said Graham Nelson, DeFi Product Lead at Centrifuge. “That’s where most of the capital allocators onchain are focused.”
Nelson noted that DAOs and stablecoin issuers are increasingly allocating to RWAs to diversify yield away from purely crypto-native strategies, positioning yield-focused RWAs as a natural bridge between traditional finance and DeFi.
Zinder echoed that assessment, arguing that less headline-grabbing use cases may scale faster than more complex asset classes.
Sponsored Sponsored“Our view is that tokenized deposits and yield on those deposits will be one of the first areas to scale,” he said. “It may not sound exciting, but it has strong distribution potential.”
Controls, Not Automation, Will Decide Scale
The panel also addressed regulatory concerns around smart contracts, automation, and emergency controls, particularly in Europe.
Speakers pushed back on the idea that pause mechanisms undermine decentralization, noting that similar safeguards already exist in traditional markets.
“Most major DeFi protocols already have emergency pause mechanisms,” Nelson said. “The real issue isn’t whether controls exist — it’s whether they’re standardized, visible, and understood by regulators.”
As RWAs become more automated and interconnected, institutions will only commit capital at scale if they can model downside scenarios with confidence.
A Two-Way Market Is Emerging
Rather than a one-directional shift from traditional finance to crypto, panelists described RWAs as enabling two-way capital flows.
Traditional institutions are exploring on-chain yield through staking and lending, while crypto-native capital is increasingly seeking exposure to real-world income streams. Infrastructure providers, they said, are building the same underlying pipes for both directions.
“The piping is actually the same,” Zinder said. “One side brings real-world assets onchain. The other brings institutional capital into crypto-native yield.”
For now, tokenized yield products appear best positioned to lead adoption. But unlocking the broader RWA market will depend on whether interoperability evolves from a crypto-native convenience into an institutional-grade risk framework.
