RWAs will run on two blockchain rails, said the Redstone co-founder.
Institutional adoption of real-world assets (RWAs) is being split between public and permissioned networks, exposing the gap between liquidity benefits of blockchains like Ethereum and privacy needs like the Canton network.
The gap is becoming more pronounced as alternative assets gain traction among major asset managers.
Marcin Kazamirchak, founder of blockchain oracle provider Redstone, said product development can happen on public blockchains, but permissioned systems are better for institutional processes that require confidentiality.
“There are some jobs between institutions that simply need to be personalized, and this is a value proposition that Canton offers in a very effective way,” Kaźmierczak told Cointelegraph.
The Digital Asset Canton Network enables banks and asset managers to flag and resolve RWAs by making transaction details visible only to relevant parties. The network says it has generated $6 trillion in RWA value by 2025.
Instead of converging on a single architecture, banks and asset managers are building parallel systems designed to serve different functions across different financial stacks, Kaźmierczak said.
The Ethereum merger was a Wall Street token moment.
Tokenization has become one of the main narratives behind institutional blockchain adoption beyond spot crypto exposure and exchange-traded funds (ETFs).
In June 2024, McKinsey estimated that certified assets could reach $2 trillion by 2030. More optimistic forecasts have much higher projections, including a $30.1-trillion target by 2034 set by Standard Chartered and Synpulse.
Regulatory transparency in the US has contributed to the change. In the year The Genius Act, passed in 2025, created a federal framework for statscoins, which will serve as a settlement layer for many tokenized assets.
Kaźmierczak said that trust in Ethereum started to improve early after the network transitioned to proof-of-stake in 2022.
“When I talked to institutions in 2022, integration was like a big question mark for those institutions,” said Kaźmierczak. “They've seen it work without a hitch, so it's given them this confidence.”
Kaźmierczak RWA projects between institutions started in It's in 2023 or 2024, but when institutions work with annual budgets, developments and project launches don't happen in weeks and months like they do in crypto. This led to a cluster of institutions announcing tokenization projects last December, he said.
“They didn't start in Q4 last year. No, they started a year ago and now we are seeing the fruits.”
Today, more than $26.4 billion worth of RWA tokens use blockchains as distribution layers, and more than $15 billion are on Ethereum. With over $160 billion in stablecoins, it maintains deep liquidity as a veteran in the smart contracts circle.
Related: Why Institutions Still Choose Ethereum Despite Faster Blockchains
Banks are splitting activity between public and private chains.
Institutions distinguish market-oriented activities from internal activities. On the one hand, public blockchains provide liquidity, efficiency, and access to decentralized finance (DeFi) mechanisms such as lending and token repositories. On the other hand, permissioned networks prefer settlement processes, bilateral transactions and internal asset management workflows that cannot be exposed on open networks.
Systems like Canton allow financial firms to automate those processes while only making transaction details available to counterparties. That framework is in line with existing traditional financial (TradFi) infrastructure.
That segment suggests that institutional blockchain adoption may not be tied to a single network model. Instead, financial organizations seem to be building parallel infrastructure, with public chains managing liquidity and permissioned systems supporting operational processes behind the scenes, Kaźmierczak said.
“There are some jobs that need to be personalized between institutions, and this is the value proposition that Canton offers in a very effective way. That's why we want to be on both feet,” he said.
Several major financial institutions have participated in the Canton Network since its inception. Digital Asset and a consortium of firms including Microsoft, Goldman Sachs and Deloitte announced the network's launch in May 2023. In September 2024, Digital Asset and Deposit Trust & Clearing Corporation completed the US Treasury Collateral Network pilot in Canton.
According to RWA.xyz, Canton Network has more than $313 billion worth of RWA tokens represented, referring to assets that use blockchain as a recordkeeping layer.
RELATED: Privacy tools are rising behind institutional adoption, says ZKsync dev
ZK-evidence with the permission of privacy
One of the most obvious differences between the two institutional paths is in how privacy is achieved. Many blockchain projects pursue confidentiality through tools such as zero-knowledge (ZK) proofs, while Canton is based on permissioned data sharing, where transactions are visible only to interested parties.
Not everyone in the industry agrees that this is the strongest model. In a social media exchange with Digital Asset's Yuval Ruz, Mater Labs CEO Alex Gluchowski said ZK systems strengthen blockchain security by requiring cryptographic proofs that each state transition follows the protocol's rules. Even if operators or administrators are attacked, attackers cannot enter invalid transactions into the ledger without valid proof of execution.
Rouse said in a blog post that the completely opaque implementation of ZK systems makes it difficult to audit activity in financial markets. If the transaction data is completely hidden, errors or fraud will go undetected, which can create the kind of “black box” situations that sparked corporate scandals like Enron.
The disagreement highlights a broader architectural question for institutional blockchain adoption, Kashemirchak pointed out.
Financial organizations are trying a number of approaches to balance privacy, authentication and control. Public networks continue to accommodate market-oriented financial transactions and DeFi activity, while permissioned systems duplicate institutional processes that require confidentiality, creating parallels to the proposed financial system.
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