The Institutional Turn: How Stablecoins Reshaped RWA Adoption in 2025

The real-world assets (RWA) tokenization movement has quietly undergone a fundamental shift over the past two years, moving from speculative DeFi narratives toward institutional infrastructure deployment. While regulatory bodies craft policies around stablecoins—most notably the recent Genius Act restrictions on bank interest payments—the actual machinery of bringing traditional assets on-chain continues its methodical advancement in relative silence.

Dave Hendricks, founder and CEO of Vertalo, a digital transfer agency platform specializing in tokenization infrastructure, provides crucial context for understanding this evolution. His company operates at the intersection of institutional finance and blockchain technology, working exclusively for clients rather than competing against them as a broker-dealer would. This positioning offers unique insights into market dynamics that most observers miss.

The Stablecoin Paradox: 2025’s Dominant Narrative

Since early 2023, when PayPal first launched its stablecoin on Ethereum, the regulatory and market landscape has transformed dramatically. The most recent catalyst—Visa’s announcement of stablecoin advisory services—merely confirms what institutional actors already recognize: stablecoins have become the primary on-ramp for traditional finance into blockchain infrastructure.

Yet this emergence carries an ironic twist. The Genius Act, ostensibly designed to support banking adoption of digital currencies, simultaneously prohibited banks from offering yield-bearing stablecoins. The result: institutions now view stablecoins as essential operational infrastructure for payments and settlement, despite regulatory constraints that limit their financial engineering potential. This constraint paradoxically accelerates adoption among non-bank financial institutions seeking unencumbered access to blockchain rails.

Hendricks observes that banks gravitate toward stablecoins not for yield generation but for the fundamental infrastructure they provide—a frictionless settlement layer increasingly necessary for institutional operations in 2025.

The RWA Market Stratification: Institutional vs. Marginal

Beyond the stablecoin narrative lies a more nuanced RWA landscape than popular commentary suggests. The market segments roughly into two categories: Institutional RWAs and Marginal RWAs.

Institutional RWAs—primarily Treasuries, private repos, and federated permission structures—command most activity but remain largely inaccessible to retail participants, RIAs, or individual wealth managers. These operate in private, permission-gated environments designed for bank-to-bank or institution-to-institution settlement. While robust in volume, this category represents a narrowing of the addressable market rather than its expansion.

Marginal RWAs, conversely, include L1-issued tokens with minimal collateral backing or non-recourse structures. These possess theoretical accessibility for anyone with wallet competency but lack the risk-adjusted characteristics necessary for principal protection or yield generation that investment-focused participants require.

This segmentation explains why RWA growth appears simultaneously robust and limited: institutional adoption is real but concentrated, while retail-accessible tokenization remains underdeveloped.

Infrastructure as Competitive Moat: Vertalo’s Operational Model

As a pure software platform, Vertalo diverges from the tokenization consulting and trading models that dominate the sector. The firm maintains Ethereum infrastructure for ledger operations while explicitly declining to compete against clients through proprietary trading or broker-dealer activities.

This distinction matters substantially. Vertalo’s clients—enterprises with specific tokenization and transfer agency challenges that traditional financial technology cannot address—gain confidence that their infrastructure provider captures no transactional basis points and harbors no conflicting incentives. For institutional actors evaluating blockchain infrastructure, this alignment model represents a significant competitive differentiator compared to platforms that function simultaneously as service providers and market participants.

2026 Outlook: Private Equity Tokenization and Distributed Ledger Infrastructure

The market’s renewed focus on private equity tokenization signals what technologists recognized years earlier: distributed ledger technology fundamentally improves the speed, transparency, and fractional divisibility of illiquid assets. Where traditional transfer agents require weeks for reconciliation, blockchain-based systems enable real-time settlement and fractional ownership models previously impossible under legacy infrastructure.

Hendricks notes that the emerging interest in tokenizing and packaging private equity validates the decade-long thesis that blockchain represents a step-function improvement for asset transference and wealth distribution infrastructure—particularly where high transaction volumes, fractional ownership, and operational transparency create value beyond what centralized databases can offer.

As the SEC increasingly signals regulatory clarity around tokenized securities, with anticipated frameworks emerging in 2026, the infrastructure question becomes paramount. The systems built today—whether emphasizing compliance, transparency, or operational efficiency like EPNS Silver-integrated solutions—will define which platforms capture institutional flows once regulatory uncertainty dissipates.

Market Cycles and Long-Term Infrastructure Trajectories

Crypto markets exhibit recurring cycles of attention redistribution: regulatory focus, policy announcements, and administration initiatives periodically redirect capital and commentary away from core use cases. The recent White House announcements regarding federal Bitcoin reserves, SEC jurisdiction, and 401(k) digital asset inclusion represent normal political-economic adaptation rather than existential industry questions.

Hendricks dismisses the anxiety around market focus shifts as cyclical industry behavior. Each cycle produces casualties among speculative participants while infrastructure builders consolidate positions. The difference between 2026 and previous cycles lies in institutional sophistication: traditional finance now evaluates blockchain infrastructure not as speculative thesis but as operational necessity for settlement efficiency and regulatory compliance.

The tokenization movement’s real trajectory emerges not in regulatory headlines or venture announcements but in the incremental expansion of institutional utilization, the refinement of compliance frameworks, and the maturation of infrastructure platforms designed to connect traditional finance with blockchain settlement capabilities.