Institutions Stuck Between Trusting Curators and Tokenized Assets
Tokenized real-world assets (RWA) are becoming increasingly important in decentralized finance (DeFi), but their adoption is hindered by a crucial issue: pricing. According to Matthew Fisher, CEO of Katana Network, an oracle's configuration starts with the venues it pulls price data from at launch, and teams upgrade it as liquidity migrates toward newer or deeper venues.
For newly listed tokens, this upgrade lags, since liquidity hasn't concentrated in any single trusted venue yet. Fisher noted that institutions delegate vetting to professional curators, who evaluate collateral, approve markets, and set exposure limits on protocols like Morpho or Aave.
A December 2025 study found a small number of curators managing ERC-4626 vaults now intermediate a disproportionate share of total value locked, concentrating underwriting decisions in that layer of the stack. Fisher's account of institutional behavior lines up with what the data already shows independently.
The curator owns the risk decision, absorbing reputational and commercial fallout when a market breaks. The depositor typically absorbs the financial loss directly, while pool-based models like Aave or isolated markets on Morpho often leave the underlying protocol with no direct liability at all.