RockawayX Drops $150M into Blockchain-Based Real-World Asset Push

Digital asset investment institution RockawayX has announced an investment of $150 million in the Catapult plan, aiming to bring more private credit and other income-generating assets from the real world onto the blockchain. The project targets a massive market potential with loans tied to the physical economy.

RockawayX, which manages around $2 billion in assets, claims that Catapult will provide support for tokenized lending products, including risk investment, product design, liquidity, market-making, and distribution. The institution currently operates early-stage risk funds, market-neutral funds providing liquidity to DeFi protocols, a vault business with deployed capital of approximately $300 million, and recently acquired the crypto hedge fund Relayer in August.

The size of tokenized real-world assets such as bonds, stocks, and funds has grown rapidly to around $38 billion, but over half of this is comprised of tokenized money market funds. RockawayX predicts that this market will reach between $1 trillion to $20 trillion by 2030, surpassing the base estimate given by a Citigroup analyst of $55 billion.

Catapult will focus on trade finance and supply chain financing, asset-backed securities, collateralized loan obligations (CLOs), and real estate-related credit. According to RockawayX CEO Viktor Fischer, 'the next big application scenario on-chain after trading is going to be income generation,' requiring new sources of revenue unrelated to the crypto market with a minimum return of 12%.

Fischer highlights that the attraction of bringing illiquid assets onto the blockchain lies in creating exit channels for market makers even when underlying investments have long redemption periods.