The experimentation phase is over. Tokenization is no longer struggling to find assets worth putting onchain. It is finding gold, uranium, rare-earth metals, bank deposits, and government bonds just fine.
The harder question now is whether those assets can be exited as smoothly as they can be issued, and there is an answer to that question that sounds more urgent than the industry has typically been willing to admit.
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Midas and the liquidity problem
Germany-based tokenization startup Midas raised a $50 million Series A led by RRE Ventures and Creandum, with backing from Framework Ventures, Franklin Templeton, Coinbase Ventures, HV Capital, and Ledger Cathay.
That is a mix of crypto-native and traditional financial investors that reflects the institutional seriousness with which the liquidity problem is now being taken.
The round came after Midas reached $500 million in TVL, distributed more than $37 million in yield across 20,000 mToken holders, and integrated its products into Morpho, Curve, and Pendle.
The specific problem Midas is building against is worth unpacking. Most tokenized real-world assets today have a version of the same weakness: when an investor wants to exit, redemption either involves a delay, depends on an external market maker willing to take the other side, or requires settlement processes that have not been made truly atomic.
Midas’s answer is its Open Liquidity Architecture, anchored by the Midas Staked Liquidity facility, a structure in which multiple liquidity providers compete for execution on each individual redemption, targeting instant, risk-free atomic settlement with initial capacity of $40 million.
The goal is to eliminate the gap between owning a tokenized asset and being able to act on that ownership, which is the gap that still makes many tokenized products feel like a slightly better version of an illiquid traditional fund rather than genuinely liquid onchain instruments.
The asset universe is expanding faster than the exit infrastructure
The Metals.io launch illustrates exactly why the liquidity problem is becoming more urgent rather than less.
Metals.io, developed by Trilitech, the London-based Tezos research and development hub, launched on the Tezos blockchain with three products: xU3O8, a tokenized physical uranium product, VNX Gold, digital ownership of allocated bullion held in a high-security vault in Liechtenstein, and the RARE token from Noemon Tech, which provides exposure to a diversified basket of five critical strategic metals including hafnium, rhenium, indium, neodymium oxide, and praseodymium oxide.
Materials that are genuinely difficult to access through conventional investment structures. The launch extends a project that began with tokenized uranium and is now moving into rare-earth metals partly in response to growing AI-driven industrial demand for those materials.
These are assets that were practically inaccessible to retail investors before tokenization. But accessibility at issuance and liquidity at redemption are two entirely different problems.
A tokenized rare-earth metals basket is a genuinely interesting product, until an investor needs to exit quickly and discovers that secondary market depth is thin, the redemption window has conditions, or converting back to fiat takes days rather than seconds.
That is the gap the industry has been able to paper over during growth phases, and the gap that becomes visible immediately in stress conditions.
Banks building the rails from the inside
The bank deposit side of the story is structurally different, and in some ways more consequential, because it represents traditional financial institutions building tokenized settlement into their own core operations rather than delegating it to an external platform.
Five U.S. regional banks, Huntington Bank, First Horizon, M&T Bank, KeyBank, and Old National, have partnered with ZKsync’s Matter Labs to develop the Cari Network, a tokenized deposit infrastructure built on the Prividium permissioned blockchain that allows participating banks to issue, transfer, and redeem tokenized deposits 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
The key structural feature is that Cari deposits remain on the bank’s balance sheet as regulated bank liabilities and are eligible for FDIC insurance, which means the tokenization layer sits inside the existing deposit guarantee system rather than outside it.
The five banks collectively hold approximately $830 billion in assets, and experts described the initiative as a direct challenge to private stablecoin issuers, an attempt by traditional banks to reclaim the programmable settlement layer from Tether and Circle before it migrates permanently outside regulated banking infrastructure.
The sovereign layer: Hong Kong builds for permanence
Hong Kong’s tokenized bond program adds the global, government-level dimension to the picture.
The city has issued multiple tokenized government bonds, including a HK$10 billion offering in late 2025, and is now developing the CMU OmniClear digital asset platform to embed tokenized issuance and settlement into core post-trade infrastructure rather than treating individual issuances as standalone pilots.
The direction Hong Kong is pursuing is toward making tokenized sovereign debt a standard settlement instrument rather than an experiment: if the infrastructure works predictably at scale for government bonds, private issuers follow, secondary markets deepen, and the liquidity arguments that still haunt tokenized RWA discussions gradually become less relevant because the settlement rails are genuinely trusted.
Layers
For anyone watching the tokenization story, the practical signal from this week is that the industry has reached the part of the curve where the basic issuance infrastructure is no longer the primary challenge.
The harder problems, atomic redemption, secondary market depth, real-time settlement across asset classes, and the trust infrastructure that allows institutional investors to exit positions at scale without moving the market, are now where the significant capital and development effort is being directed.
The future of tokenized real-world assets may depend less on what gets tokenized next and more on which platforms can build the shared liquidity layer that makes all of it feel usable when it matters most. Under pressure, at scale, and in real time.
Crypto market researcher and external contributor at Kriptoworld
Wheel. Steam engine. Bitcoin.
📅 Published: April 2, 2026 • 🕓 Last updated: April 2, 2026
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