RWA Sector Expands into Mortgages and Public Blockchains
ECGI Holdings and Nomyx have begun a live pilot to tokenize up to $10 million in mortgage loans, aiming to digitize real estate credit on-chain. Meanwhile, European banking giant BNP Paribas has started testing public blockchain infrastructure to tokenize money market fund shares, signaling a shift from permissioned to open networks.
- The ECGI Holdings pilot aims to create a compliant, institutionally-aligned platform for tokenized mortgages by leveraging its acquisition of RezyFi, a licensed mortgage lender in 29 states. This strategic acquisition provides the necessary operational and licensing infrastructure to bridge traditional mortgage origination with a blockchain-based secondary market. - In the mortgage tokenization space, ECGI's initiative will compete with players like Figure Technologies, which uses its native Provenance blockchain for loan origination and has securitized billions in home equity lines of credit. Another notable firm, Better.com, recently partnered with Framework Ventures to access up to $500 million in credit from the Sky stablecoin ecosystem, bringing DeFi capital into the U.S. mortgage market. - BNP Paribas is specifically testing a permissioned-access model on the public Ethereum network, seeking to combine the broad reach and network effects of a public chain with the control required for regulated financial products. This "walled-garden" approach on a public blockchain allows them to explore benefits like 24/7 trading and instant settlement while ensuring only authorized participants can transact. - The bank's experiment on Ethereum is a direct follow-up to a previous tokenized money market fund issuance on a private blockchain in Luxembourg. By testing both environments, BNP Paribas is strategically comparing the operational and technological trade-offs between private and public DLT for fund tokenization. - BNP's test is part of a larger institutional trend of leveraging public blockchains for their superior liquidity, security, and innovation velocity compared to private, permissioned ledgers. The bank's internal AssetFoundry™ platform provides the core technology, from tokenization to network connectivity and wallet management, for these intra-group experiments. - The broader RWA tokenization market is projected to grow significantly, with forecasts for 2030 ranging from McKinsey's $2 trillion to Roland Berger's estimate of over $10 trillion. These projections underscore the large addressable market that both the ECGI and BNP Paribas initiatives are targeting.
