With the exception of fiat-backed stablecoins, RWAs have yet to establish a strong product-market fit in DeFi, despite long-standing interest in the category. This is primarily because, as standalone products, RWAs and their real-world returns cannot compete with the higher liquidity opportunities and substantial upside offered by crypto-native assets.

We recognize these challenges and understand the solutions required to build deep liquidity for RWAs on-chain, fostering greater interest among active DeFi users who currently drive liquidity flows within the industry. Our approach focuses on building RWA protocols tailored for DeFi users, rather than creating crypto products for TradFi customers.

re.al views tokenized RWAs and their consistent yields as ideal building blocks within a DeFi ecosystem, providing a reliable store of value and scalable incentive funding. As off-chain yields are brought on-chain, they create a sustainable source of funds to power protocol growth:
- Consistent, Durable Value: Quality real-world assets provide a stable and reliable foundation for the chain.
- Optimal Incentive Funding: Reliable real yields are used to sustainably fund liquidity incentives.
- Enhanced Liquidity and Composability: RWAs are consistently tokenized as rebasing ERC-20s, improving liquidity and composability within the ecosystem.

This scalable flywheel, powered by off-chain yields, forms the core of re.al's unique approach within the RWA category. Moreover, all individual products are built to be cross-chain, recognizing the importance of integrating with the larger DeFi ecosystem rather than operating within a specific walled garden.

Additionally, re.al is entirely community-owned and the first L2 where 100% of profits from transaction fees and protocol fees accrue to the L2’s governance token holders, paid in re.al’s native ETH. We have never raised funds from VCs, ensuring that the entire governance token supply is in circulation. This model ensures that the community and ecosystem users are the primary beneficiaries of the chain’s adoption and growth, creating optimal incentive alignment between the team and the community.

According to DeFiLlama, the Real World Assets category accounts for $6.2b of TVL across all the chains tracked. Only $49.8M, or 0.8%, sits in protocols deployed on Arbitrum. At the current time, RWAs don’t belong to Arbitrum. re.al aims to change this by onboarding tens of millions of liquidity to our permissionless Orbit L2.

We recognize that other blockchains provide dedicated features for RWAs. Although, to our knowledge, re.al is the first to market as the only permissionless L2 dedicated to RWAs, and the only vertically integrated ecosystem for RWA liquidity. re.al is not just about a few RWA protocols, but it’s setting the stage to onboard tens, hundreds of applications to bring Real World economies onchain.