Tokenized real-world assets have crossed $24 billion in market value. And yet most of that value is sitting on chains where trading volumes are thin, custody standards are uneven, and regulatory frameworks remain deliberately vague.

On September 29, 2025, LKI Founder Laura K. Inamedinova - also serving as Chief Ecosystem Officer at Gate.com at the time - took the stage at Institutional Horizons in Singapore to moderate a candid conversation on what it will actually take to move RWAs into the mainstream.

Panelists

1.Hassan Ahmed - Country Director, Coinbase
2.Carl Aspeling - VP of Business Development, Forte
3.Tim Enneking - Managing Director, Psalion
4. Hersi Shima - CEO & Co-Founder, Liqvid

The $24 billion figure is a ceiling, unless liquidity problems are solved first. Aspeling argued that custody, settlement, and cross-chain interoperability are all necessary, but settlement is where institutions draw the line. Without predictable, T+0-capable settlement across chains, institutional desks won't allocate at scale - regardless of asset quality or yield.

Geography matters more than most RWA frameworks acknowledge. Enneking made the case that Asian banks testing stablecoins for trade finance and U.S. institutions gravitating toward tokenized ETF structures aren't just stylistic differences - they reflect fundamentally different legal architectures. The common limitation across both? A lack of clear rules on who holds legal title to a tokenized asset in a dispute.

Regional pilots are generating real data, but adoption hasn't followed. Shima pointed to UAE and Hong Kong's tokenized treasury and real estate experiments as the most instructive cases to date. The lesson isn't that the technology failed - it's that the secondary market infrastructure didn't materialize. Tokenized credits and real estate remain closest to institutional readiness, but only in jurisdictions where the post-issuance market has also been considered.

Exchanges are absorbing infrastructure costs that shouldn't fall to them. Ahmed identified two concrete blockers at the exchange level: inconsistent token standards across chains, and the absence of a shared framework for institutional-grade compliance checks at the asset level. The three steps he outlined - standardized token metadata, on-chain compliance layers, and recognized cross-border custody - are achievable. None of them requires regulatory approval to begin building.

"Regulations aren't clear enough" is becoming a deferral strategy, not a diagnosis. The panel's consensus - including from Ahmed and Enneking - was that two gaps matter most: legal clarity on asset ownership in the event of platform failure, and a recognized framework for cross-border transfers of tokenized securities. Goldman and BNY Mellon exploring tokenized money market funds signals institutional appetite. It doesn't signal that the structural problems are solved.