Tokenization of real assets opens a new investment era for individual investors.

Tokenizing real-world assets (RWA) can expand investment access for individual traders, similar to how ETFs have helped the public access financial instruments when they first launched in 1993. This is the opinion of Mr. Christopher Perkins, President and Managing Partner at the investment firm CoinFund.

"I believe that tokens are the new generation of ETFs," Mr. Perkins shared in an interview with Cointelegraph. According to him, tokenized RWA assets – which can be traded 24/7 on global markets – help minimize information asymmetry that is a barrier preventing retail investors from accessing private investment products under current regulations.

"Ordinary people cannot access the private market. The nature of this market is privacy," he added. "In the U.S. today, about 81% of companies with revenues over $100 million are private companies – according to statistics from BlackRock. This means that people can hardly access the companies that are innovating and growing the fastest today."

Tokenization of RWA is considered a prominent application of blockchain technology. It not only increases the speed of capital circulation but also allows for fundraising through asset fragmentation, creating new types of collateral for DeFi applications, restructuring the current capital formation model, and democratizing access to the global financial market.

Although tokenized stocks are growing, this type of asset is still in its infancy. Source: RWA.XYZ## Traditional public investment opportunities are shrinking.

"The current public market is facing a serious crisis. The system is no longer operating as originally designed," Mr. Perkins remarked.

According to him, the number of publicly listed companies in the US has decreased by nearly 50% since the 1990s. "We are raising less and less capital in the public market – this is completely unreasonable," he emphasized.

As the number of private companies and their total market capitalization continues to increase, retail investors are still being excluded from this playing field.

Recently, the brokerage platform Robinhood has launched the feature of trading tokenized stocks for customers in Europe. As part of its strategy to expand into the tokenized stock sector, Robinhood has also announced that it will distribute a small amount of tokens representing "private equity" in OpenAI and SpaceX to users.

The number of private companies and their total market capitalization continue to increase, but retail investors have yet to participate in this asset class | Source: Yahoo FinanceHowever, these tokens only provide the ability to track the value of private companies, and do not represent any ownership or voting rights in the business.

OpenAI has also warned users that these tokens are not issued by them, are not approved by the company, and do not represent any stake in the company.

Despite these warnings, Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev revealed that many private companies are still showing interest in listing their shares in tokenized form on this platform.

Thạch Sanh