Trendy words and crypto often go hand in hand, especially considering the cyclical nature of crypto market cycles. A concept that is popular in one fiscal quarter may become completely outdated in the next.

There are some great examples like music NFTs, Bitcoin Ordinals or blockchain-based games. The list goes on, and it’s clear that achieving product-market fit is as difficult in the crypto world as in any industry focused on new technologies.

While one of the trendy buzzwords this market cycle is real-world assets (RWAs), the concept of tokenizing tangible assets has been around for years. This application has been widely used in decentralized finance since 2022. There are even those who think that everything will be tokenized in the future and RWAs will revolutionize finance.

According to Kinto co-founder and CEO Ramon Recuero, tokenized real-world assets serve as an increasingly necessary bridge between buyers and sellers, allowing asset owners to unlock liquidity that is otherwise difficult to access.

Recuero gave the example of a valuable baseball card collector. “Finding liquidity will be really difficult. It will be really difficult to find a buyer,” Recuero said. “And then you have to trust them. “You have to hire an escrow service or use some software service platform that charges a big fee, 5% to 10%.”

Blockchain technology offers a solution to this problem:

“Blockchain has enabled us to turn everything into a market, an efficient market. “So it will be able to concentrate liquidity a lot and make all of these markets much more efficient for both sellers and buyers.”

When asked whether RWAs could represent a “multi-trillion-dollar opportunity,” Recuero explained that these results are “difficult to extrapolate” because “exponential adoption” is unpredictable and takes time. “These things are not linear,” he shared.

“For example, we have $500 billion. It took eight years. So, we will reach 5 trillion dollars in 10 years.” The total value will fluctuate over several years, “in one year, it will go from $650 [million] to $3.4 trillion. Because these networks operate with exponential adoption.”

Returning to an earlier question about whether RWAs are another trendy word that will fade away at the end of the current bull market cycle, Recuero argued, “It is asset-dependent.”

He gave the example of US Treasury bonds and said, “US Treasury bonds are not associated with Bitcoin. Therefore, this asset will perform really well in bear markets. “For example, it would make sense to have a combination of US Treasury bonds or stablecoins that give you that kind of return.”