TradFi is building Ethereum L2s to tokenize trillions in RWAs: Inside story

2025-05-27 16:00:59 Primitive Reading

Shortly before Ethereum’s shock 50% price surge earlier this month, when bearishness about its roadmap was reaching its zenith, Real Vision founder Raoul Pal was asked on a podcast if he thought Ethereum was cooked.

The former Goldman Sachs executive said he’d heard that narrative a lot, but it was wrong — not least because TradFi considers Ethereum to be the “Microsoft” of blockchain.

“It clearly works very well for what the financial markets need,” he said.

If the finance system comes, they’ll go there. There’ll be stablecoins and SOL and SUI and all of this stuff — but is Goldman going to build in Solana? Highly unlikely. Is JPMorgan? Highly unlikely. And will they build their own Layer 2s? Highly likely.”

The growing awareness that TradFi has already tokenized billions worth of US Treasurys and commodities in the Ethereum ecosystem was cited by Bernstein analysts as a big factor in ETH’s recent price recovery.

And TradFi has plans to tokenize billions — if not trillions more — of real-world assets (RWAs) using custom-built L2s.

The biggest tokenization firm in the world, Securitize, is collaborating with DeFi protocol Ethena to build an RWA-focused L2 called Converge. Alibaba affiliate Ant Digital has just announced its own RWA-focused rollup called Jovay, and last week, Robinhood bought WonderFi, which has just launched the Wonder L2 as part of ZKsync’s Elastic chain network. The Bernstein analysts suggested the L2 may become Robinhood’s new tokenized stock trading platform.Converge and Ethena founder Guy Young tells Magazine that institutions believe Ethereum is the most censorship-resistant and secure base layer for settlement, and its appeal is only enhanced by a sophisticated DeFi ecosystem of protocols like Aave and Pendle. Ethereum L2s offer the chance to make these protocols more suitable for TradFi requirements.“It’s hard to imagine an alternative layer 1 coming close to gaining the trust of issuers at scale,” he says. “When Converge launches, those financial primitives and apps will have permissioned versions where institutions can deploy assets in a regulatory-friendly manner, and that’s a key differentiator that could see L2’s gain more market share of RWA’s.”As Young suggests, Ethereum’s base layer is the undisputed leader for RWAs, accounting for 58% of the total $22.6 billion tokenized real-world assets. But surprisingly enough, in second place is zero-knowledge proof L2 ZKsync Era with $2.19 billion. That’s more than 8x the value of the entire ZKsync market cap.

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