RWAs are great on paper.

Their goal has always been to merge crypto’s programmability and accessibility with assets that have deep markets, real world use cases, and high demand. Real financial assets that can be accessed and composed like software.

Conceptually, it’s beautiful. But that’s not how RWAs have played out to date. 

What was supposed to be a swelling ocean looks more like a shallow lagoon. Plenty of assets have made their way onchain, but liquidity hasn’t followed. These assets technically have access to the onchain world, but their shallow markets have made it all but impossible for most to plug into DeFi in any meaningful way. 

That means drastically reduced composability and programmability and, as a result, limited ability to participate in revenue-generating activities like lending and staking. Without these attributes, RWAs look more like static representations of assets than meaningful improvements over their offchain counterparts.

The workaround became tokenizing assets that already had cashflow, typically in the form of yield, like T-bills and money-market funds. But these assets are usually held in physical form 1:1 with the onchain versions, sacrificing the efficiency and scalability that made RWAs exciting in the first place. So this is more of a bandaid than a solution.

We believe that for RWAs to truly be issued onchain at scale, they need to be liquid, capital efficient, and differentiated.

Tenbin’s Yuki Yuminaga went back to the RWA drawing board and started with a core belief: the next generation of tokenization needs to bring market structure onchain. He knew that to properly deliver on the promise of RWAs, the entire process through which assets come onchain needed to be reworked. 

Tenbin provides synthetic price exposure to commodities, currencies, and their underlying market structure via managed futures positions on the most liquid offchain exchanges. For example, when a user deposits USDC to mint Gold, Tenbin takes a portion of that, opens a futures position on the CME that it auto-rolls, and puts the remainder into high-quality, liquid yield-bearing assets. This supports liquidity for instant, onchain liquidation and covers any financing costs associated with offchain positions. With this structure, Tenbin assets will capture combined yield from both the offchain basis and onchain USDC interest while remaining fully 1:1 backed by USD fiat and USDC at all times. 

By sourcing liquidity and pricing from the deepest offchain markets, Tenbin allows for fast and predictable redemptions. It removes the need for market makers to warehouse illiquid inventory onchain and significantly improves slippage and inventory depth. 

In other words, Tenbin allows tokenized assets to become genuinely usable at scale.

We’ve always been excited about RWAs, and today we’re thrilled to support Tenbin’s $7M Seed round alongside other investors we deeply respect.

With Yuki at the helm, and an incredibly talented team including Hugo Chan and Jake Lang, Tenbin is bringing us one step closer to tokenizing the world’s GDP.

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Tenbin: https://www.tenbinlabs.xyz/ 

Tenbin on X: https://x.com/tenbinlabs 

Yuki Yuminaga: https://x.com/ballsyalchemist 

Hugo Chan: https://x.com/hocryptogu 

Jake Lang: https://x.com/jake_lang

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