In 2025, the RWA sector transitioned from conceptual discussions to a phase of aggressive integration into traditional markets. The focus shifted from simple debt instruments to energy resources and critical infrastructure.

In a new piece, ForkLog analyzes the architecture of the commodity market, examines key startup cases, and assesses the risks of the impending financial reality.

The Evolution of Tokenization

At the end of 2025, BlackRock executives Larry Fink and Rob Goldstein described the intersection of traditional institutions and digital innovations in an essay for The Economist as building a bridge from both sides of a river:

“These two sides are not so much competing as learning to interact. In the future, people will not hold stocks and bonds in one portfolio and cryptocurrencies in another. All types of assets will one day be purchasable, sellable, and stored in a single digital wallet.”

Last year, the RWA sector emerged as the most profitable in the crypto market. This success, bolstered by predictions of a bright future for the tokenization of real-world assets and the rather bleak situation across the blockchain industry, made this direction the sole hope for investors.

In October, analysts at Standard Chartered estimated the capitalization of the RWA segment at $2 trillion by 2028. In December, Grayscale predicted a 1000-fold growth in the niche over the next four years.

ARK Invest joined the trend, believing that tokenization could increase by up to 50,000% in the next five years.

According to RWA.xyz, on January 22, 2026, the sector's value, excluding stablecoins, surpassed $22 billion. The leader in the tokenized asset segment was U.S. debt obligations, totaling $9.5 billion.

Initially driven by U.S. Treasury bonds, startups are now digitizing collective ownership of loans from private corporations and real estate.

The 2025 boom included trading shares of public companies on "crypto rails," a possibility offered by many major CEX and DEX platforms. Additionally, Telegram users gained the ability to purchase TradFi market securities directly within the app.

The next development vector for RWA is forming around commodities. At the time of writing, the market capitalization of the commodities subcategory stood at $4.8 billion, with over 80% attributed to Tether Gold (XAUT) and Paxos Gold (PAXG).

Despite pioneers like Tether tokenizing gold, silver, and other precious metals for over five years, oil had not been a focus. Serious discussions about digital rights to this asset only began about two years ago.

As regulatory clarity develops and the push for total tokenization continues, the oil, gas, and essential resources market for the AI economy may join RWA and even lead the trend in the near future.

Banner about the upcoming addition of data on tokenized oil and gas products. Source: RWA.xyz.

Resource Economy

Tokenization of resources is an emerging trend within the broader RWA framework, not yet supported by figures in reports but already "charged" by pioneering companies. Early experiments with commodity products have demonstrated the technology's ability to instantly pool liquidity in capital-intensive sectors, bypassing banks that struggle to meet the needs of the accelerating AI economy.

The tokenized commodity market has undergone natural selection. The early startup Elmnts on Solana, which offered revenue-sharing from oil extraction, has now entered withdrawal mode. The project's social media activity ceased four months after its public beta launch in October 2024.

Projects that lost momentum have given way to players backed by institutional support and improved business models. Furthermore, under current regulatory conditions protected by advanced laws in the U.S., EU, and UAE, organizations can establish tangible legal boundaries that were lacking for pioneers.

Hadron, from USDT issuer Tether, offers "turnkey" tokenization using institutional-level verification technology across a wide range of sectors, including commodities.

The UAE-based company Tharwa (TRWA) operates within the Abu Dhabi financial center jurisdiction. The project targets Middle Eastern markets and tokenizes gold, real estate, and shares in the oil industry. Integration with the decentralized protocol Pendle allows investors to separate and trade the underlying asset (Principal Token, PT) and expected yield (Yield Token, YT), providing access to Sharia-compliant finance without elements of riba.

Another RWA startup, Mineral Vault (MNRL), has chosen the specialized Plume Network blockchain and offers built-in compliance mechanisms at the protocol level.

The team is working on tokenizing royalties from over 2,500 active oil and gas wells in the U.S. owned by partner Allegiance Oil & Gas. Essentially, the owner of the Mineral Vault I token holds a stake in mineral rights valued at $10 million.

Mineral rights are a distinct type of ownership of subsurface resources, granting the owner rights to extract oil, gas, and other resources beneath a parcel of land, independent of surface rights.

Mineral rights can be leased to American energy companies that extract resources in exchange for royalty payments to the rights holder. This structure allows owners to earn passive income, hedge against inflation, and achieve long-term value appreciation, all while incurring minimal costs or risks associated with drilling or maintaining wells.

The legal structure built through bankruptcy-remote special purpose companies guarantees investors payments in the stablecoin USDC. The targeted yield, set at 10-12%, makes this asset competitive with traditional bonds.

On October 1, 2025, the Zoniqx startup team 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 financing for operators. Each ownership share is issued in the form of a security token, ensuring automated compliance, verification of investor rights, and full lifecycle management of the asset.

In the modern RWA sector, the technical assurance of rights is achieved through specially developed token standards:

  • ERC-7518 from Zoniqx is based on ERC-1155 but adds dynamic compliance. Unlike older versions, it is designed for cross-chain transfers while preserving all legal restrictions and owner data;
  • ERC-3643 is a "smart" token with built-in black and white lists, used by the leading player in the field, Ondo Finance. Before each transaction, the algorithm queries an oracle for confirmation: "Has the buyer passed KYC? Are they under sanctions? Are they allowed to own this asset under their country's laws?" If not, the transaction is automatically blocked;
  • ERC-1400 is one of the first and most flexible standards for tokenizing complex financial instruments. It supports collective ownership of assets, division of rights (e.g., income or management shares), forced token transfer by court order, and attachment of legal documents to token metadata;
  • ERC-4626 is the standard for tokenized yield vaults, which has become the foundation for many RWA funds like Ondo OUSG and BlackRock BUIDL. It standardizes deposits, withdrawals, and yield calculations, simplifying their integration into DeFi as collateral assets.

Amid real projects, the USOR (U.S. Oil Reserve) token on the Solana network gained attention in January 2026 due to rumors of accumulation by wallets linked to BlackRock and the Trump family. However, Arkham Intelligence's verification and project audit revealed no real connections to the U.S. Department of Energy. The startup's description contained technical inaccuracies in its documentation and showed signs of a scam.

RWA has once again proven its significance not only for corporations but also for the administration of the current U.S. 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 confirmed its technical readiness to comply with the Procurement Rules for U.S. defense needs.

The utility token, issued on the Sui blockchain, ensures traceability of the supply chain for purified neodymium oxide produced at the ReElement facility in Noblesville, Indiana. It is designed as an internal audit and compliance tool for the ReElement platform and its clients, integrating data and control protocols that meet standards.

Resource Finance

Tokenization of physical assets on the blockchain generates new financial instruments and accelerates the migration of traditional finance to crypto infrastructure. The synergy of the two systems is already evident.

As noted by analysts at Messari in their report The Crypto Theses 2026, the emergence of InfraFi—a breakthrough direction at the intersection of RWA and DePIN—is a response to the limitations of traditional banking.

Until 2025, most attempts at private on-chain lending suffered from so-called "toxic flow" and adverse selection. The example of the Goldfinch protocol is telling: initially designed as a tool for efficient lending to emerging markets, it faced underwriting issues. Consequently, the best borrowers turned to traditional lenders, leaving on-chain pools with the riskiest assets. By 2026, the focus shifted from refinancing debt to creating new assets: tokenizing infrastructure (GPU, energy) secured by real objects, where income is generated from usage rather than speculation.

Messari introduced a term to describe the connection of on-chain capital with real infrastructure lending, where returns do not correlate with crypto volatility. Attention has shifted to production assets and equipment that generate predictable cash flow and remain off the radar of traditional capital markets due to fragmented demand.

The transformation of computing power into a standalone production resource for the future AI economy became the starting point for the emergence of the startup USD.AI. Traditional private lending funds overlook the segment of small and medium AI enterprises. Their requests typically start from loans of $20 million for hyperscalers like CoreWeave. AI startups needing six-figure sums for GPU purchases find themselves in a "financial desert."

USD.AI addresses this issue through a combination of frameworks. The main innovation is the abandonment of physical ownership of equipment by the borrower:

  • Placement—GPUs are delivered directly to a third-party data center;
  • Usage rights—the borrower receives legal permission to operate the production capacities but not ownership rights until the three-year loan is fully repaid;
  • Liquidation—in case of default, rights to access computing resources are reassigned through on-chain governance mechanisms. Access to GPUs is transferred to a new tenant. This turns GPUs into reusable, income-generating assets that can pass through multiple lending cycles without physical relocation.

A parallel model is forming in the energy sector through the DePIN project Daylight. Distributed energy resources like solar panels and home batteries share similarities with GPUs: high capital costs at the start and predictable cash flows in the future.

Daylight allows users to invest in equipment installation and earn income from real-time energy generation. In 2026, the intersection of energy and computing became a strategic frontier: derivatives on computing often now include hedging risks—both in electricity prices and GPU availability.

For InfraFi to function effectively, reliable connections between on-chain systems and real assets and processes are critical. This is where blockchain oracles like Chainlink and Pyth come into play.

The convergence of on-chain and off-chain worlds requires massive and continuous data flows, significantly enhancing the practical value of the corresponding protocols and their tokens. The undervaluation of this segment suggests a future rally as it becomes the foundational settlement layer for the new economy, as recent news confirms.

Oracle provider Chainlink launched the 24/5 U.S. Equities Streams product. It provides DeFi protocols with quotes for American stocks and ETFs around the clock on weekdays.

As the market structure becomes more complex, indices and derivatives are becoming dominant instruments. As Messari notes, computing (GPU-hours) has become a 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 are creating a "gold standard" for computing power pricing by aggregating data from around the world.

The Squaretower platform has launched GPU futures, allowing AI labs to lock in their operating costs while protecting against chip shortages.

Daily chart of the perpetual futures for H100 chips/USDT. Source: Squaretower.

The RWA sector requires thoughtful protection against real threat vectors.

The transparency of registries necessary for market advantage becomes a vulnerability when storing large fortunes. The public nature of a wallet holding a significant stake in oil rigs or GPU farms makes it a target. Responses to this may include ZKP mechanisms that allow ownership rights to be verified without disclosing the balance.

To secure rights to strategic assets, PoW blockchains appear stronger, but the RWA segment currently favors the creation of specialized networks. These, due to a limited set of scenarios and participants, lower economic diversification, and concentration of trust points, potentially present increased interest for hackers.

It is also important to remember: blockchain protects the record of ownership but not the physical object itself. In the event of nationalization or destruction of a tokenized object like an oil rig, the token becomes a claim against an insurance company or the state. The effectiveness of RWA here directly depends on the stability of the jurisdiction.