Where Finance Never Fully Arrived
In many emerging economies, traditional financial institutions were never established and therefore didn’t collapse. They arrived over time, unevenly, incompletely. Speaking globally, bank branches were sparse and credit is either too expensive or inaccessible. Cross-border capital moves at a snail's pace and for a king's ransom. Small and medium-sized businesses, despite accounting for the majority of employment, are almost totally excluded. In Sub-Saharan Africa, only 20%-30% of MSMEs (Micro, Small, and Medium Enterprises) have access to formal credit, limiting growth for businesses that provide 80% of regional employment.
Finance is not neutral. It shapes who can plan long-term, who can invest, who can absorb risk, and who must operate hand-to-mouth. When access is limited, capital formation slows and opportunity remains local, fragile, and easily disrupted.
RWA tokenization begins from a different premise: that assets can exist, move, and be financed without assuming the presence of large centralized intermediaries. That premise fits emerging markets not because it is revolutionary, but because it is familiar.
Convergent Evolution, Not Disruption
There is a symmetry between how RWAs have evolved and how finance has operated for decades in emerging markets. Both were forced to build outside legacy systems. Both learned to favor modular infrastructure over monolithic institutions. Both assume that trust must be engineered through structure, not inherited through reputation. One could argue that this shows a type of convergent evolution of financial systems.
RWA infrastructure had to be invented because traditional finance could not support programmable ownership, real-time settlement, or global participation without enormous friction. Emerging markets, meanwhile, have long relied on parallel systems, such as mobile money, informal lending, and community savings to compensate for institutional gaps. Today, mobile money accounts exceed 1.7 billion globally, with transaction volumes in some countries surpassing 50% of national GDP. It is likely that these two worlds are on a collision course.
Case Study I: Gold as a First Asset
Consider a small business owner in West Africa who stores value the way many have for generations: in gold. The asset is trusted, but static. It cannot be easily sold without friction, cannot be used as collateral, and cannot generate yield.
In a tokenized RWA system, that same gold can be vaulted, verified, and represented on-chain in fractional units. The owner does not need to liquidate the asset to access liquidity. Instead, they can borrow against it, transfer portions to family members, or earn yield by supplying it into a lending pool. The gold remains gold, but it becomes financially legible.
Skipping a Stage, Carefully
Emerging markets are often described as leapfrogging stages of development. Mobile phones replaced landlines where in many places, landlines didn’t exist. Digital wallets bypassed bank branches where in many places branches did not exist.
RWAs represent a similar moment. Instead of recreating decades of institutional finance before becoming investable, emerging economies can move directly toward systems where assets are issued digitally and owned fractionally. Minimum investment thresholds which are typically often a barrier to participation, fall away. Exposure to real estate, commodities, or productive infrastructure no longer requires five- or six-figure commitments or institutional access.
Case Study II: Credit Without a Bank
Imagine a cooperative of agricultural producers in Southeast Asia. They own land, equipment, and inventory, but lack access to formal credit. Local banks view them as too small, too fragmented, or too risky. Informal lenders fill the gap, often at punitive rates.
Through RWA tokenization, the cooperative’s receivables and inventory are tokenized and verified. These assets become collateral within an on-chain credit market. Lenders can see cashflows and performance history directly. Interest rates adjust dynamically based on real data. Credit no longer depends on institutional proximity but on provable performance.
Access as a Multiplier
Access is frequently framed as inclusion. In practice, it actually behaves more like a multiplier.
When individuals can hold tokenized representations of real assets, they gain more than exposure. Assets can be saved, transferred, pooled, or used as collateral acting as a multiuse financial instrument in the same way traditional instruments can be utilized. This could explain why stablecoin adoption has surged in emerging markets. Countries facing currency volatility such as Nigeria, Argentina and Turkey, rank among the highest in global usage. RWAs extend that same logic beyond currency into ownership itself, allowing people to hold value in forms that are productive rather than purely defensive.
Case Study III: Property Without Gatekeepers
Take a mid-sized commercial building in a fast-growing city in Latin America. Traditionally, ownership is concentrated among a small group of investors due to high minimums, legal friction, and limited liquidity. Smaller investors are excluded, despite living and working in the same city.
Through tokenization, the property is structured into compliant digital units. Rental income flows on-chain. Investors can enter with small amounts, exit without waiting years, and use their ownership as collateral elsewhere. The building doesn’t change but who gets to participate does.
Structure as Discipline
Once assets are liquid, financeable, and visible, they are then tested by markets. Poorly structured assets fail and inconsistent verification is exposed. Projects without cashflow eventually lose access to capital and a lesson is learned, the system matures and the cycle continues.
On-chain RWAs (excluding stablecoins) now exceed $36 billion, growing more than 2,000% since 2020. That growth has made it clear, demand is not the constraint but Infrastructure is.
A Different Center of Gravity
The implication is subtle but important. Emerging markets are not the periphery of the RWA ecosystem. They may become its center of gravity.
Where access is scarce, infrastructure must be strong. Where trust is expensive, systems must be explicit. Where capital formation is constrained, efficiency must compound faster. RWAs are not simply extending finance into new regions; they can help those regions to shape what modern finance looks like.
Key Takeaways
- In emerging markets, access the infrastructure
Traditional finance didn’t fail in many regions, it never fully arrived. RWAs can act not as an upgrade, but as a foundation that allows assets to exist, move, and be financed without relying on absent institutions. - Emerging markets may shape the future of RWAs, not just adopt them Where access is scarce and trust is expensive, infrastructure is imperative. As RWAs scale, emerging markets are positioned to become a center of gravity for asset-based, on-chain finance, not its edge.
- RWAs and emerging markets evolved toward the same solutions
Both were forced to build outside legacy systems, favoring modular, programmable infrastructure over centralized intermediaries. - Tokenization turns trusted assets into usable financial instruments
Gold, credit, and property already exist and are trusted locally. Tokenization can help to make them liquid, financeable, and legible within modern markets.
