RWAs have been adopted by institutions at breakneck speed, especially over the past 2 years
However, the growth in the RWA vertical is generally contained within institutions
Retail-friendly RWAs are not a new concept. DApps that tokenised alternative assets such as luxury goods (high-end watches, handbags and wines) date back to 2021 but failed to find PMF
However, a new iteration of the above, TCG Gacha dApps have found PMF due to optimal asset selection in the form of TCGs, as well as by leveraging the speculative flywheel in the form of Gacha packs
Gone were the days when CT was saying that “institutions are coming”, for they have already arrived and sunk their roots into the crypto industry. 2024 was a watershed moment for institutional adoption of RWAs, fueled by US T-Bills (one of the most popular tokenised products) offering multi-decade highs in interest rates. In the same year, BlackRock launched their BUIDL fund on Ethereum, creating a halo effect that triggered other institutions such as Franklin Templeton and Fidelity to follow suit. Since then, RWA adoption has been increasing rapidly, currently commanding US$21.24B in TVL (Source: RWA.xyz) and accounting for 16.47% of the total DeFi TVL (US$128.927B, Source: DeFiLlama).
The RWA landscape of today is mature and outpaces its TradFi incumbents across liquidity, settlement, redemption and other key factors. Today, RWA is highly integrated into DeFi, with Ethena’s USDtb currently holding more than US$850 million worth of BlackRock’s $BUIDL. Beyond DeFi, CEXs such as Binance have also integrated $BUIDL as an off-exchange collateral for its institutional clients.
It is without a doubt that the RWA vertical has grown massively. However, who are these RWAs for and how many of these products can retail participants access or interact with?
I analysed the top 10 RWA Assets (Source: RWA.xyz) to answer one question: Can retail actually participate?
On paper, several of these products are “available” to non-institutional users. In practice, 70% of these assets have high minimums (often US$100k+) which push participation toward institutions and sophisticated capital. Additionally, half of the assets above have a holder count of around 100 or less, which shows how exclusive the RWA vertical has become.
You might be wondering, why the obsession with retail participation? Evidently, we can see that the growth in the RWA vertical is generally contained within institutions. This begets the question: Is the endgame of RWA just a digital mirror of the existing gated financial system? If we sacrifice accessibility and composability in the name of institutional adoption, we are not innovating but just re-skinning TradFi.
The real question is whether RWAs can actually deliver on the DeFi promise, or if they’re destined to remain a playground for the suits.
Retail-friendly RWAs are not a new concept. DeFi Summer 2021 was a watershed moment for the crypto industry and a fever dream for many. As the name suggests, DeFi was the talk of the town which inspired various innovative ideas and solutions. A type of decentralised application (dApp) that emerged revolved around the tokenisation of luxury goods such as high-end watches, handbags and wines.
These dApps had very similar designs. The luxury goods would be authenticated and stored in vaults, while their digital twins would be represented on-chain via NFTs for transparency and assurance. Fractional ownership of these luxury goods was also a common feature, enabling users to buy fractional shares of said “item”. Another common integration is the ability to post these “items” as collateral on lending markets - an idea that did not take off due to pricing volatility which resulted in low Loan-to-Value (LTV) ratios, creating inefficient lending markets.
Where these dApps shined is their inclusiveness of retail participants, which were undoubtedly their main target audience. It was a good idea to ride on the hype generated by DeFi, NFTs and the concept of tokenisation.
While these dApps aimed for retail inclusivity, they faced a key problem: collision of hyper-niche demand for high-tier luxury goods with a still-nascent crypto user base. Even today, crypto’s monthly active users comes to around 40-70 million (Source: a16zcrypto). This accounts for 0.66%-1.16% of the 6.05 billion internet users (Source: Statista). Attempting to find product market fit (PMF) in such a narrow subset of the population was highly challenging.
To the average participant, RWAs that matter are retail-accessible, liquid and culturally native. The newest iteration of tokenised alternative assets, TCG Gacha dApps, tick every one of these boxes. Their success can be attributed to 2 main factors:
Optimal Asset Selection: These dApps tokenised high-demand real world goods in the form of Trading Card Games (TCGs) such as Pokemon & One Piece which have massive, culturally-aligned audiences
The Speculative Flywheel: The inclusion of a gacha mechanics which feeds the inherent crypto-native desire for asymmetric wins
Let’s break these factors down one by one.
Optimal Asset Selection: TCGs
TCGs are no longer a fad but a rapidly growing asset class, estimated to have a global market size of US$7.8b in 2025 with an estimated Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 7.9%. Some of the top TCGs in the market include Pokemon, Magic The Gathering (MTG), Yu-Gi-Oh, and most recently, One Piece. More than 50% of TCG economic activity is driven by the secondary market. Platforms like eBay and Whatnot facilitate US$3+ billion in secondary market resales annually. These solutions sustain the ecosystem but come with friction in the form of high platform fees as well as rampant counterfeit items and scams.
Going hand in hand with the secondary market is the rise of grading companies such as PSA, Beckett, CGC and more. Collectors would often send their high-tier cards for grading services to authenticate and assess the quality and condition.
This is done in hopes of earning a Gem Mint 10, which highly elevates the price of the card. For instance, a PSA 10 copy of the Monkey.D.Luffy Manga Rare from the set OP05-119 commands a price premium of 117.3% (~US$6,045) compared with a “raw” copy of the same card.
Furthermore, due to the wide range in prices of TCG products (from as cheap as a few dollars to multiple millions), this makes it very accessible for all walks of life to participate, whether they’re here to speculate, collect or simply play the TCG.
It is without a doubt that TCGs have penetrated the social fabric, with top content creators such as Logan Paul and IShowSpeed spearheading this movement. Seemingly everybody has at least heard of TCGs, with some venturing into the trenches themselves to speculate and flip these collectibles for a tidy profit. TCGs have transformed from a simple hobby to a profit generator which ties in very well to the next portion on Gacha.
The Speculative Flywheel: Gacha
These gacha dApps build on the concept of representing real world items (raw cards, graded slabs, sealed products) as NFTs on-chain.
I will be using PlayKami as a case study to explain the TCG Gacha product mechanics.
Each gacha pack has:
A fixed purchase price
A verifiable prize pool
Transparent odds and value tiers for its contents
On top of that, the protocol offers:
Instant buybacks at 90% market value
Physical redemption (and shipping) option
As well as a marketplace to list and offer the cards that you pulled
As compared to physical gacha products, often dubbed “oripa”, TCG Gacha dApps provide users with fair, immutable odds & Expected Values (EV) that can be verified on-chain. Additionally, with instant buybacks, users can seamlessly rip packs and profit immediately, enhancing capital efficiency and improving User Experience (UX).
To date, TCG Gacha dApp volumes have grown exponentially, from a monthly volume of US$10.4m in Jan 2025 to US$82.5m in Dec 2025; that’s a 7.92x increase in a year! Sector leaders such as Courtyard & Collector Crypt are doing more than US$5m in revenue per week each, with Collector Crypt hitting a weekly activity peak of US$19m in the second week of 2026. Coupled with the boom in the TCG secondary market, steady growth in the TCG Gacha segment is also expected to continue.
The combination of culturally-aligned audiences, accessible prices (lower tier products/cards) and a speculative engine have seemingly allowed tokenised TCG Gacha dApps to find PMF.
As the crypto industry matures and onboards an increasing number of traditional firms, it is paramount to consider if we should completely let go of the ethos of decentralisation – the same concepts of transparency, accessibility and immutability that we once lauded as the bedrock of DeFi.
Institutionalisation of a vertical and even the industry is inevitable. We will likely continue to see a rising number of protocols that are tailored for institutions. Due to the nascency of the newly institutionalised RWA products, it is understandable that retail exclusion might be a structural choice rather than oversight, done to ease the transition of these institutions. Once this transition period is complete, the optimistic outcome is for these products to find a middle ground between being fully institutionalised and degen.
Nonetheless, one thing’s for sure: the future of RWAs is bright.
https://a16zcrypto.com/posts/article/state-of-crypto-report-2025/
https://www.statista.com/statistics/617136/digital-population-worldwide/
https://www.cardladder.com/indexes/onepiece
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/trading-card-games-analysis-report-114800642.html
https://dune.com/zkayape/pokemontcgsol
*Disclosure: The information provided in this article is for general informational purposes only and does not constitute professional nor investment advice.
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