The coverage of RWA tokenization is almost entirely written from the perspective of institutional capital in New York, London, and Singapore. The conversations are about BlackRock's BUIDL, the DTCC's settlement infrastructure, and whether the CLARITY Act will pass the Senate. These are real and important stories.
But there is another story — arguably the more important one — that gets almost none of the coverage. It is about a farmer in Kenya, a small business owner in Argentina, and a salaried worker in Nigeria, each of whom has more to gain from RWA tokenization than any institutional allocator with access to prime brokerage accounts and Treasury money market funds.
The Problem These Countries Live With Every Day
To understand why tokenized real-world assets matter disproportionately in emerging markets, you need to understand what it is like to hold savings in a currency that is actively destroying them.
In Nigeria, the naira lost roughly 70% of its value against the US dollar between June 2023 and early 2025. If you had 1 million naira in a savings account in June 2023, by early 2025 that money had the purchasing power of 300,000 naira. Your bank account went up in nominal terms; you got poorer in real terms. In Argentina, cumulative inflation exceeded 200% in 2023 alone. In Turkey, the lira shed more than 450% of its purchasing power between 2020 and 2024.
For hundreds of millions of people in these economies, holding savings in local currency is not a neutral choice — it is a slow-motion wealth transfer from ordinary savers to governments that deficit-spend. The traditional alternative — hold US dollars — requires either a US bank account (which most people cannot get) or physical dollars (which cannot earn yield).
This is the problem tokenized real-world assets solve more elegantly and more completely than anything that has come before.
The Stablecoin Entry Point
The stablecoin market now exceeds $322 billion in total market capitalization, surpassing the foreign exchange reserves of 95 nations. Transaction volume hit $33 trillion in 2025, representing 72% year-over-year growth. The majority of that growth is not from traders or institutional desks in developed markets. It is from ordinary people in high-inflation economies using stablecoins as a practical savings and payments tool.
A Nigerian holding USDC is holding a dollar-denominated digital asset that does not depreciate with the naira. That is, straightforwardly, one of the most useful financial tools available to someone in that economy. But holding USDC is still just holding cash. The RWA layer adds the piece that makes it genuinely transformative: yield.
Why Tokenized Treasuries Change Everything
A US investor with a Fidelity account can earn 4.5–5% annually in a Treasury money market fund with the click of a button. That is mildly better than a savings account, mildly useful as a cash management tool, and probably something they give minimal thought to.
A Nigerian worker holding their savings in USDY — Ondo Finance's yield-bearing stablecoin backed by short-term US Treasuries — is earning 4.5–5% annually in US dollar terms on savings that would otherwise be losing 30–50% annually in naira terms. The yield is not mildly better than the alternative. It is incomparably better. The gap between "hold naira at the bank" and "hold USDY via MetaMask" is not 1–2 percentage points — it is the difference between certain, steady wealth destruction and protected, yielding savings.
This framing — from a January 2026 analysis — is blunt but accurate. Every dollar that moves from a Nigerian naira savings account into a USDC wallet that holds USDY is a dollar denominated in and backing the US Treasury market. The geopolitical dimension of RWA tokenization in emerging markets is not subtle: the United States is building the distribution infrastructure for its debt into every economy on earth through the stablecoin and tokenized Treasury ecosystem.
Private Credit for Emerging Market Borrowers
The access asymmetry runs in both directions. Emerging market borrowers — small businesses in Kenya, fintech startups in Colombia, trade finance intermediaries in Southeast Asia — often pay 20–40% annual interest rates on local currency loans from traditional banks, because local banks have no access to global capital markets and price the currency risk into every loan.
Tokenized private credit protocols like Goldfinch and Centrifuge have been built specifically to address this. Goldfinch connects global stablecoin liquidity to creditworthy emerging market borrowers at rates the borrowers cannot access through traditional channels. A small business in Manila that would pay 35% in pesos can access capital at 12–15% through a tokenized credit facility, because the global pool of stablecoin holders willing to accept that yield is larger and more liquid than Manila's local banking system.
Stablecoin liquidity pools fund real-world loans in emerging markets, SME financing corridors, and trade finance, with yields significantly above what Treasury products can offer. The borrower gets cheaper capital. The lender gets higher yield. The difference — what the local banking intermediary was extracting — disappears.
The Crop Insurance Case — Where All Three Layers Connect
The most complete picture of how RWA infrastructure transforms emerging market lives comes from parametric crop insurance — a topic we cover more deeply in our companion piece on tokenized insurance. Consider this scenario:
A smallholder farmer in Kenya plants a maize crop. They cannot get crop insurance from a traditional insurer because the claims assessment process requires an adjuster to visit the farm, which costs more than the policy is worth. They have no protection against drought. If it does not rain enough in the growing season, they lose their crop and potentially their home.
With on-chain parametric crop insurance (Etherisc and Arbol have both deployed this in Kenya), the farmer pays a small premium. The smart contract monitors rainfall indices from NOAA satellite data via Chainlink oracles. If rainfall drops below the defined threshold, the payout triggers automatically — no claims form, no adjuster, no waiting period. The farmer receives payment in stablecoins to a mobile wallet within hours of the drought threshold being crossed.
The farmer in this scenario has used three layers of RWA infrastructure: a stablecoin as the payment currency, a tokenized insurance contract as the risk product, and a decentralized oracle network to connect the real-world weather data to the smart contract. None of these required a traditional bank account. None required a credit history. None required a lawyer or a claims adjuster.
The Access Numbers
Standard Chartered estimated that up to $1 trillion could shift from emerging market bank deposits into stablecoins over the next three years. S&P Global projected that USD stablecoin holdings across 45 emerging markets could climb to $730 billion. Those are the stablecoin projections. The tokenized Treasury and private credit layers sit on top of them — the same populations, with the same access problems, gaining access to yield and capital that the traditional banking system has never provided them.
The $33.5 billion in on-chain RWA value that the sector currently reports is almost entirely held by institutions and crypto-native participants in developed markets. The next $100 billion is more likely to come from the 2 billion people in high-inflation economies who have more to gain from tokenized dollar yield than any hedge fund manager in Manhattan.
→ RWA explained from scratch — start here if this is new
→ Stablecoins and RWA — the settlement layer that connects them
→ RWA Mainstream Adoption: What Needs to Happen