BlackRock’s RWA Push Sparks ‘Land Grab’ Fears As Wall Street Moves To Dominate Tokenized Assets
Based on BlackRock Chairman Larry Fink’s annual letter to shareholders, Real World Assets (RWA) are being built into the pipeline of Wall Street product offerings. Do the originators of the concept have a chance to be players here? Or will RWAs be run by Big Finance?
“It opens up the biggest land grab in history for financial institutions,” Will Peck, Head of Digital Assets at Wisdom Tree, said about RWAs and tokenization more broadly during an American Banker event on Dec 2, 2025.
When the likes of Larry Fink speak about the tokenization of every financial asset, the crypto community is understandably conflicted.
“On one hand, having the world’s largest asset manager validate blockchain – albeit for their own ends – is the ultimate validation and vindication. But on the other hand, there’s a fear that traditional finance is arriving not to join the revolution, but to colonize it,” said Saeed Al Fahim, founder of Tharwa, a UAE-based DeFi platform focused on RWA tokenization.
Some crypto natives refer to RWA models now as simply “wrapped TradFi”, whereas physical assets like land and real estate are digitized but everything around it is centralized within the usual Big Finance ecosystem.
“Token holders may gain liquidity, but they don’t gain meaningful control or transparency,” said Al Fahim. “I think that runs counter to the principles that crypto was founded on, and I don’t think there’s a quick fix that can remedy that.”
The RWA concept began around 2020 within the small universe of the DeFi blockchain bros. Early players like MakerDAO (CRYPTO: DAO) and Centrifuge (CRYPTO: CFG) began using the concept when they started backing stablecoins and crypto currency loans backed by real estate, or Treasury bonds. It then became the go-to phrase to describe what was seen as a potential new DeFi product line.
RWA was born in the crypto universe. But it has been adopted by Wall Street giants, led by BlackRock.
The RWA market has reached an estimated $25 billion in 2025, driven by major financial players and blockchain technology.
RWA: Regulatory Concerns and Questionable Use Cases
RWAs connect traditional markets to a blockchain. They let you invest in real-world value using digital tools. Tokenized securities generally fall into two categories, as defined by the Securities and Exchange Commission in January 2026: securities tokenized by or on behalf of the issuers of such securities; and securities tokenized by third parties unaffiliated with the issuers of such securities. Investors can access high value assets like real estate, gold, or government bonds without needing large capital. Tokenization turns them into small, tradable units, though some might say that this already exists …
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