Introducing Layer One: The Newest Podcast from The Block

Layer One•November 20, 2025, 12:00PM EST
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Introducing Layer One: The Newest Podcast from The Block
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With the sunsetting of The Scoop, this newsletter has now migrated to our newest podcast offering. Welcome to Layer One: the podcast and newsletter exploring the intersection of crypto and the real world. In collaboration with Avalanche and hosted by The Block’s Kelvin Sparks and Hypha founder Steven Gates, Layer One brings you inside the conversations driving blockchain forward.

This week, our hosts were joined by Haseeb Qureshi, partner at Dragonfly, and Sean Lippel, partner at FinTech Collective, to discuss the future of DeFi, institutional onboarding and the surge in tokenized real-world assets. In our inaugural newsletter, we’re diving deeper into the RWA narrative to look at the major trends and players bringing billions of dollars onchain.

Onchain RWAs set to top $2 trillion by 2028

Tokenized real-world assets have been one of the most explosive growth sectors of the past several years. From a total value of just $100 million in mid-2020, the sector has now surged to a combined market cap of over $35 billion. And an even more impressive boom may be just around the corner.

Last month a report from Standard Chartered’s Geoffrey Kendrick predicted that the tokenized asset space will expand to $2 trillion by the end of 2028: a more than 50x increase that would see it match the current market cap of Bitcoin. This trend is being spearheaded by stablecoin adoption, DeFi’s trojan horse in the world of traditional finance.

“We are in an institutional cycle around stablecoins, tokenization, and borrow and lend. Every single enterprise and institution needs to have a digital asset strategy.”  – Sean Lippel
 

The race is now on among issuers to bring more varied assets onchain, while L1s compete to capture the incoming waves of value. Leading the pack in the most recent surge of tokenization are Avalanche and Polygon, both adding hundreds of millions in RWA TVL over the past 30 days (with +93.4% and +143.9% growth respectively).

A sizable portion of this recent growth is down to Blackrock’s BUIDL Fund: the largest tokenized US treasuries fund with a $2.8 billion value — with $500 million added on Avalanche over the past month alone. Meanwhile, tokenized stocks have seen a near 7,000% annual increase. Other relatively immature RWA categories, such as private equity and non-US government debt, likewise saw their growth top 1,000%.

The swathes of legacy financial instruments coming onchain represent a thawing of traditional finance’s attitude towards DeFi. But as Qureshi told us this week: “Historically, the people who’ve been onchain are all basically onchain to speculate. This is the YOLO side of their portfolio. They’re not here to buy stocks.” So what additional benefit does the average retail DeFi user really gain from this great wave of institutional onboarding?

The answer lies in how tokenization is disrupting legacy markets.

Rather than simply replicating TradFi equivalents 1:1, tokenization has the potential to transform markets, opening up completely novel types of investment. The golden example of this is tokenized real estate, where fractional tokenization removes all of the traditional barriers for entry: high initial costs, illiquidity, and long settlement times.

A two-week settlement period is reduced to two seconds; thousands of dollars in fees are reduced to just a few pennies. Speculators can trade cheap fractions of properties with the efficiency of stocks, while investors build yield-bearing portfolios of rental properties. 
 
This is an example of what Lippel called the “Fintech of the future, built on modern RWA and stablecoin rails,” which he said will “open up broader access to people, [and] lower fees across the board; across every single vector of finance, it’s going to be better.” That’s why estimates by Deloitte place the tokenized real estate market at $4 trillion by 2035.

Ultimately, it’s this streamlining of markets, the removal of costly intermediaries, and the lightning-fast efficiency of onchain execution, which is driving the tokenization narrative. And everyone — speculators and savers, retail and institutions — stands to benefit.

Podcast Recap: Is DeFi ready for mass adoption?

In the first episode of Layer One, we invited on VC investors Haseeb Qureshi (Dragonfly) and Sean Lippel (FinTech Collective) to talk high-stakes poker, the challenges facing DeFi adoption, high-profile hacks and more.

Subscribe to Layer One on Youtube, Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. 

In the Headlines: The stories driving the conversation this week

  • Coinbase recently launched its own token sale platform, which will allow its 100 million+ users to participate in ICOs. The platform went live on November 17 with the Monad ($MON) token sale. With no access restrictions for US users, could this be the move which injects fresh energy into a lethargic crypto fundraising space? Bitwise CIO Matt Hougan reckons so, predicting “a half-dozen or more billion-dollar ICOs" to come in 2026.
  • The platform behind Blackrock’s BUIDL Fund is considering going public at a $1 billion valuation. RWA heavyweight Securitize — the biggest platform of its kind with around $4 billion in tokenized value — is reportedly in talks with Cantor Fitzgerald over plans to merge with a blank-check company backed by the veteran financial services firm.
  • Intain Markets and FIS announced plans to launch the Digital Liquidity Gateway on Avalanche. This new platform will allow around 2,000 regional and community banks across the USA to securitize and trade loan portfolios. As Ava Labs president John Wu said, this is another great example of “how Avalanche’s blockchain technology is modernizing real-world finance, helping community banks expand credit access and strengthen local economies.”

Top of the Charts: The race to secure RWA TVL is on

Keep up with the latest in tokenization, DeFi, and institutional adoption by subscribing to Layer One's weekly market insights.

Layer One is brought to you in collaboration with Avalanche.


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