Welcome, and thank you for being part of the MyZucoins community! Dive into some important crypto, finance, and tech news to stay ahead.
If DeFi Wants to Grow, It Has to Embrace Real-World Assets
Decentralized Finance (DeFi) has made a significant splash in the cryptocurrency world, with a total value exceeding $44 billion. It’s a promising avenue for crypto holders to generate passive income and for borrowers to secure loans promptly, outperforming traditional institutions. However, despite its success in the crypto sector, DeFi’s presence in the broader asset industry remains negligible. To grow, DeFi must build bridges with the traditional asset ecosystems, attracting real businesses and institutional investors.
DeFi faces significant hurdles, including the over-collateralization requirement which necessitates borrowers to pledge more than the loan’s value. This approach imposes considerable risks on borrowers and limits accessibility. Furthermore, the sector struggles with incentivization, closely tied to available liquidity. The value of many DeFi tokens plummeted during the “crypto winter” last year, where activity fell due to wider economic factors, coupled with careless management by crypto exchanges. These combined forces along with several others, caused significant damage to various incentive systems.
The integration of tokenized real-world assets—like bonds, equities, tangible assets like gold, real estate, art—may provide a solution. Tokenization creates digital versions of real-world assets on a public blockchain, making transactions more transparent, efficient, and cost-effective. The potential efficiency of DeFi protocols has caught the attention of traditional institutions, with several reputable entities like BlackRock and Banco Santander exploring DeFi.
Tokenizing traditional assets can revolutionize transactions, enabling more seamless and transparent exchanges without intermediaries like brokers. DeFi’s smart contracts facilitate faster transactions with reduced costs, improving trust and accountability. Moreover, real-world assets offer stability to DeFi protocols and can act as alternative collateral forms.
The introduction of these assets opens up DeFi to a variety of businesses and allows investors to benefit from DeFi-exclusive services like staking and yield farming. Despite potential resistance from crypto purists, intertwining traditional assets with DeFi may be the gateway to a broader digital asset ecosystem and sustained growth. Read more here.
Tokenize Everything: Institutions Bet That Crypto’s Future Lies in the Real World
Tokenization’s appeal could also lie in its ability to democratize access to costly markets, allowing smaller players to participate. For instance, a YouTube content creator could tokenize their copyrighted content assets, selling it to financiers who then own the rights to the royalty streams from the videos. This model wasn’t previously accessible to smaller entities. Tokenization could even revolutionize the shipping industry, where typically, a shipper would get financing from a bank. With tokenization, they could find capital or organize international agreements from anywhere in the world.
We covered another report of tokenisation’s potential last month, where it could be a $5 Trillion opportunity in the coming years.
A report from Boston Consulting Group suggests that by 2030, the tokenized RWA market could be valued at $16 trillion. For perspective, this would mean each bitcoin would be worth $800,000, if bitcoin’s market cap was $16 trillion. Tokenization has been around since 2017 and is now receiving renewed interest as major institutions are showing an appetite for investing in tokenized assets. A recent Ernst and Young report found that 57% of institutional investors want exposure to tokenized assets.
Tokenization is promising, but it isn’t free from potential issues. It carries the risk of creating dangerous products that leak into wider asset and financial markets, a concern reminiscent of the 2008 financial crisis. However, proponents argue that the transparency of blockchain could make it easier to spot systemic risk. For now, tokenization remains the realm of accredited investors, but its champions believe it can help regular people by making high-bar markets more accessible for individuals and smaller companies. Read more here.
Ways Zucoins Could Position Themselves for Asset Tokenization
Zucoins, with its Splitchain network, could harness the growth potential of DeFi by incorporating real-world assets. The tokenization of such assets, including equities, bonds, and physical items like gold or property, could offer a diversified asset portfolio to users. The Splitchain network, known for its ease of use and efficiency, could provide the perfect platform for such transactions, making them transparent, quick, and cost-effective.
Zucoins and the Splitchain network could also benefit from the increasing interest of traditional institutions in DeFi. With heavyweights such as BlackRock and Banco Santander dipping their toes into DeFi, Zucoins and Splitchain could position themselves as leaders in bridging traditional institutions and the next proposed generation of the web, Web3. This could involve pitching unique features that cater to these institutions’ needs, such as fast transaction settlement speeds, lower costs and increased transparency to ease compliance.
Zucoins could also benefit by maintaining their focus on simplicity and user-friendliness. As the world of DeFi can be complex and intimidating for many, creating a platform and a digital product that are easy to understand and use could attract a broader range of users. By doing so, Zucoins and the Splitchain network could continue to position themselves well in the emerging DeFi space.
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All the best,
Peter & Rob
MyZucoins