Real-world assets (RWA) are attracting on-chain capital through tokenized revenue products, but speakers agreed that broader institutional participation hinges on interoperability frameworks delivering predictable outcomes in the event of system failures, not only during normal operation.
One of the clearest differentiators raised at this Space was how institutions evaluate new financial infrastructure. “Institutional adoption does not move merely because of high interest,” said Alex Zinder, Blockdaemon Chief Product Officer. “Institutions are not asking, ‘Does this work?’, but, ‘Could it fail? If so, how severely could it fail?’” The panel included Alex Zinder (Blockdaemon Chief Product Officer), Graham Nelson (CentriFuse DeFi Product Lead), Aravind Kumar (Avail Head of Business), Aishwary Gupta (Polygon Labs Payments and RWA Lead), and Ivan Marchela (8lends Chief Communications Officer), bringing together the perspectives of infrastructure providers, real-world asset platforms, and cross-chain experts.
The panelists consistently focused on one theme: crypto-native tools have advanced rapidly, but institutional finance evaluates risk from a very different perspective. In a multi-chain real-world asset environment, this difference becomes even more important. Cross-chain infrastructure currently moves stablecoins and crypto assets efficiently, but institutional investors demand clarity on governance, accountability, and recovery plans in the event of problems. The opportunity is not in removing fragmentation; we must solve interoperability and embed it fundamentally into the design.
Blockchain fragmentation has been described as more than a temporary inconvenience. Fragmentation is not a technical problem, and when tokenized assets are dispersed across multiple blockchains that are not fully interoperable, liquidity becomes isolated, prices diverge, and capital efficiency declines. Even as real-world assets grow to trillions of dollars, fragmentation can significantly limit their utility. From Polygon’s perspective, the challenge is not merely interoperability but how to manage execution risk.
Leave a Reply