$23 billion. That's the combined size of tokenized treasuries ($11B) and private credit ($12B) today - and it's growing while most of the digital assets market is still recovering.

LKI CEO Maryna Barysheva moderated a panel at Orak Cannes during EthCC on March 30, 2026, where four experts discussed the impact of institutional adoption on DeFi and RWA.

Panelists:

1. Charles Jansen - Managing Director, Digital Assets & DeFi, S&P Global

2. Claire Balva - General Manager, Adan

3. Nathan Chiron - Chief Ecosystem & Revenue Officer, iExec

4. Andrej Bencic - Co-Founder and CEO, Tenderly

Institutions aren't blocked by belief - they're blocked by two missing pieces. Jansen named them directly: standardized data infrastructure and clear custody frameworks. S&P Global has already launched tokenized indices tracking digital assets, but even at a $30B market cap, the infrastructure isn't ready for institutional scale.

Europe has the rulebook but not the playbook. Balva made a point worth sitting with: MiCA is arguably the clearest regulatory framework for digital assets anywhere in the world, yet Singapore and Hong Kong are running ahead on adoption. Two gaps are holding Europe back. First, a lack of regulatory sandboxes that let institutions experiment without full compliance liability from day one. Second, fragmented national implementation of MiCA, which creates legal uncertainty even within the EU. Rules without coordination aren't enough.

The real bottleneck for RWA scale is secondary market liquidity. Without deeper secondary markets and more liquid trading venues, RWAs are attractive in theory and illiquid in practice. Fixing this requires both more issuers and more active market makers willing to operate in regulated token environments.

BlackRock's $3B BUIDL fund isn't an outlier. Chiron pointed to BUIDL alongside Franklin Templeton and Goldman Sachs launches as evidence that tokenized money market funds are becoming the default institutional entry point. More and more FMIs are entering the space and looking for familiar structure, low risk, and 24/7 settlements.

Security risk scales with institutional capital - and DeFi infrastructure hasn't caught up. Bencic didn't soften this. The industry lost over $3 billion in 2025, including the $1.4B Bybit hack. As institutional RWA volume grows, the attack surface grows with it. The solution isn't just better auditing - it's building real-time monitoring and incident response infrastructure that matches what institutions expect from traditional finance.

When asked what unusual asset classes have the most on-chain potential, the panel pointed to infrastructure assets, carbon credits, and intellectual property - all areas with clear cash flows and markets that have historically been difficult to access at scale.