The rise of Solana Real World Asset Tokenisation
Tokenisation of real-world assets (RWAs) refers to the process of representing ownership rights to tangible or even intangible items, ranging from real estate, commodities, to even intellectual property, using digital tokens on a blockchain. This transformation allows for fractional ownership, global transferability, and increased liquidity of assets that are traditionally illiquid or difficult to access. The concept has gained traction across financial institutions and tech-forward enterprises due to its potential to streamline asset management, reduce reliance on intermediaries, and democratise investment opportunities. Tokenisation also introduces programmability into asset ownership, enabling automated compliance, dividends, and governance through smart contracts. Venues such as Bitfinex Securities now provide opportunities for both issuers of tokenised securities to raise capital through this asset class, and for investors to get access to investments that may not have been traditionally available to them.
In recent years, RWA tokenisation has become a notable area of experimentation within legacy finance, seeking to modernise infrastructure and unlock new efficiencies. Institutions such as BlackRock, JPMorgan, and the European Investment Bank have explored on-chain representations of traditional securities, treasury instruments, and commercial assets. Much of this early activity has gravitated towards Ethereum, owing to its dominant position as the leading smart contract platform and its extensive ecosystem of Decentralised Finance (DeFi) protocols. Ethereum’s established infrastructure, network effects, and developer community made it the de facto standard for pilot RWA initiatives, despite its known limitations around transaction costs and throughput.
However, the landscape is shifting. Solana has emerged as a serious contender in the RWA space, offering faster transaction speeds, significantly lower fees, and a growing suite of infrastructure tailored to institutional needs. As more RWA use cases demand real-time settlement, microtransactions, and scalable on-chain interactions, Solana’s performance characteristics have attracted attention from both startups and traditional financial players. Its compatibility with token extensions, oracles, and permissioned environments adds further appeal to developers seeking flexibility without sacrificing speed or cost-efficiency. Projects like Homebase (real estate), Baxus (luxury goods), and Credix (private credit) exemplify how tokenisation is rapidly diversifying on Solana.
The Liquid Network, a Bitcoin sidechain developed by Blockstream, presents a distinctive alternative for real-world asset tokenisation when compared to Ethereum and Solana. While Ethereum dominates through its mature ecosystem and general-purpose smart contract functionality, and Solana appeals with its high throughput and low-cost infrastructure optimised for scalable applications, Liquid offers a more conservative but purpose-driven model rooted in Bitcoin’s principles. Liquid’s design philosophy prioritises security, minimalism, and trust minimisation in line with Bitcoin’s original objectives. Unlike Ethereum and Solana, which embrace expressive programmability and complex DeFi composability, Liquid adopts a more constrained scripting environment that emphasises predictable execution, deterministic outcomes, and confidential transactions. Its architecture is oriented around reducing reliance on third parties through mechanisms like Partially Signed Elements Transactions (PSET) and confidential assets, aligning with Bitcoin’s focus on peer-to-peer integrity and auditability without sacrificing privacy. This approach makes Liquid particularly suited for financial applications that value reliability, discretion, and adherence to Bitcoin-native paradigms over rapid iteration or maximal flexibility.
Liquid supports confidential transactions, native asset issuance, and covenant-based smart contracting via the Elements platform. These capabilities enable trust-minimised asset swaps and options contracts without relying on third-party enforcement, a feature that aligns with the network’s focus on financial sovereignty and interoperability. Unlike Ethereum’s broad programmability and Solana’s composable DeFi environment, Liquid emphasises deterministic, privacy-conscious execution and settlement finality. This makes it well-suited for RWA use cases where confidentiality, regulatory clarity, and predictable behaviour outweigh the need for maximal flexibility or composability. This has attracted issuers such as USTBL (tokenised US treasury bills), MikroKapital (tokenised microfinance bonds) and the Blockstream Mining Note (Bitcoin hashrate contract). Though not as widely adopted as its counterparts, Liquid’s architecture is appealing to institutions and developers seeking Bitcoin-native infrastructure for RWAs that balances smart contract functionality with auditability and reduced counterparty risk.
The broader trend suggests that the tokenisation of RWAs is no longer confined to Ethereum’s boundaries. While Ethereum remains central to DeFi and legacy onboarding, Solana’s momentum is a reflection of evolving user expectations around usability, latency, and transaction cost. As regulatory clarity improves and financial products evolve to meet blockchain-native standards, competition between ecosystems may further accelerate innovation. In this context, Solana’s rise highlights not just a technical advantage, but a paradigm shift in how financial markets might adopt public infrastructure for real-world applications.
How Does Tokenisation of RWAs on Solana Compare to Similar Efforts on other blockchains?
The tokenisation of real-world assets (RWAs) across platforms like Ethereum, Solana, and Liquid Network reveals differing strategic approaches to integrating traditional finance into blockchain systems. Ethereum has historically led in this space, thanks to its mature smart contract functionality, expansive developer ecosystem, and deep integration with the decentralised finance (DeFi) sector. Early RWA ventures, including tokenised bonds, real estate, and credit markets, gravitated toward Ethereum due to its EVM-based tooling and established liquidity. In contrast, Liquid takes a more focused route by leveraging Bitcoin’s underlying principles, prioritising deterministic execution and confidential transactions through specialised scripting and covenants. While Liquid lacks Ethereum’s general-purpose programmability, it offers a simpler, security-oriented environment for specific RWA use cases like options and swaps.
Despite its early dominance, Ethereum’s throughput limitations and volatile transaction fees have made scalability a persistent concern for RWA developers. High-frequency trading or real-time asset evaluation becomes costly and cumbersome on Layer 1, prompting migrations to Layer 2s that often fragment liquidity and tooling. Solana addresses this with its high-throughput, low-cost design, enabling direct deployment of performance-intensive RWA applications without relying on auxiliary layers. Meanwhile, Liquid operates with an entirely different set of trade-offs, focusing on privacy-preserving swaps and low-trust financial contracts through the PSET standard. While it doesn’t compete on speed with Solana or composability with Ethereum, Liquid’s design is suited for scenarios where bilateral settlement integrity and regulatory simplicity are paramount.
Solana’s architecture, with its single-shard execution and purpose-built token primitives, has evolved to accommodate increasingly sophisticated RWA deployments. Features like token extensions allow developers to enforce transfer restrictions, automate interest logic, and integrate compliance directly at the token level. This level of protocol-native enforcement offers an alternative to Ethereum’s reliance on external contracts and middleware. Liquid, while not as expressive in programmability, offers unique benefits such as confidential asset issuance and deterministic settlement logic, which can be advantageous for institutions with stricter audit and reporting requirements. Where Solana emphasises real-time interaction and high-frequency performance, Liquid offers predictable, low-risk contract execution anchored in Bitcoin’s security model.
Ethereum continues to be the preferred platform for institutional RWA pilots, largely due to its regulatory familiarity, audit-ready tooling, and market inertia. Solana is rapidly catching up in terms of developer engagement and infrastructure readiness, particularly in emerging sectors requiring agile settlement layers. Liquid, while less prominent in institutional headlines, appeals to actors prioritising minimised counterparty risk and conservative deployment logic, especially in sectors like private bilateral markets or security token issuance. Although Liquid lacks the vast app ecosystems of Ethereum or Solana, it offers an alternative that may appeal to institutions already aligned with Bitcoin-native infrastructure or that favour minimal exposure to open DeFi environments.
Which Way are Institutions Leaning for Their RWA Infrastructure Needs?
Institutional adoption of RWA tokenisation has so far aligned with Ethereum’s stability and compliance-focused ecosystem. Major institutions like BlackRock and JPMorgan have piloted their tokenisation efforts on Ethereum or Ethereum-compatible chains, capitalising on the familiarity of the EVM and the established legal frameworks built around it. Liquid, while not yet a common destination for large institutional RWA programmes, is growing fast, recently surpassing more than $3bn in terms of TVL as demand for regulated asset tokenisation increases. It provides robust primitives for asset issuance and trust-minimised options, and its alignment with Bitcoin may position it well for future use in conservative financial sectors or regulated custody environments. Compared to Solana’s experimental flexibility, which does carry elements of risk if smart contracts fail or are hacked, Liquid positions itself as a lower-friction toolset for predictable, narrow-scope deployments.
Ethereum’s scalability bottlenecks have pushed many institutions toward Layer 2s or sidechains, but these solutions can introduce complexity and dilute the core benefits of ecosystem composability. Solana sidesteps these challenges by delivering low fees and high speed at the base layer, though its trade-off comes in the form of reduced decentralisation. Liquid, on the other hand, avoids these scaling debates entirely by narrowing its focus: it does not aim to host a wide range of general-purpose applications but instead delivers precise functionality for confidential settlement and atomic swaps. While Liquid may not appeal to institutions seeking open-ended programmability, it offers a cleaner, more deterministic foundation for discrete asset settlement processes.
Solana’s increasing appeal among newer institutions and fintech operators stems from its responsiveness to high-volume, low-latency needs. Applications in sectors like private credit, commodities, and real estate are particularly suited to Solana’s infrastructure. Liquid serves a different niche, enabling trust-minimised interactions via tools like atomic swaps and fully collateralised options contracts, often in contexts where participants already operate within Bitcoin-oriented frameworks or require confidentiality. Unlike Solana, Liquid does not focus on open composability but rather on discrete, verifiable outcomes. This makes it less visible in the generalised RWA discourse but no less relevant for particular applications that value privacy and contract simplicity over throughput.
The landscape is fragmenting by function. Ethereum remains the institutional default, anchoring large-scale, high-value, slow-moving asset structures with extensive legal and compliance integrations. Solana is absorbing developer mindshare for RWAs requiring speed and frequent state changes. Liquid, though operating in a quieter corner of the ecosystem, provides a foundation for private, bilateral settlement infrastructure, suited to niche use cases where regulatory simplicity, determinism, or Bitcoin-compatibility matter more than feature richness. As RWA tokenisation continues to evolve, it’s likely that each platform will solidify its role in a broader, complementary multi-chain architecture, one where Liquid coexists with Ethereum and Solana, serving specific operational or regulatory needs.
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