# RWAs: What Comes After Tokenised Treasuries — Jacopo Buriollo | Megawatt

- Channel: [ETH Belgrade Community](https://streameth.org/eth-belgrade-community)
- Date: 2026-10-06
- Duration: 18:40
- Topics: People & Blogs
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-ifbr6f7VF1Y
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifbr6f7VF1Y

## Transcript

Okay. Hello, everyone. Uh I'm Jacopo and as you said, uh I run a company called Megawatt. Megawatt finances solar and battery energy storage farms in Central and Southeastern Europe. We basically build the project and the land. We fund the construction and then basically capital comes in. Uh each farm is uh sitting in its own company and when capital comes in, they basically put capital in and the energy revenue from the farm is basically paying this capital back. I've been in crypto since 2016 and before that I had uh roughly 15 years of digital transformation for large multinational companies, which is a polite way of saying that I've watched uh those institutions being told they were going to be disrupted. And I kind of sit on the both sides of the disruption argument, both from inside the institutions that were going to be disrupted and also inside the projects that were doing the disruption. And today I want to talk about a category of assets that almost nobody has tokenized yet. Uh why they are hard to tokenize, um what it takes to tokenize them, and why it's worth tokenizing them. So, let's see first what actually scaled so far and let's speak about what actually happened, not what was expected to happen. And if we look at what moved on chain so far and stayed there, we have mainly three categories. We have treasuries, we have money market funds, and we have short-dated credit. You know, real values, real institutions, real volumes. There is also There are also tokenized stocks. Previous presentation mentioned them. Um they're a smaller category. We're talking about a couple of billion compared to tens of billions of these assets. However, they are an important one and I'm going to speak about them in a bit. If then we look at what was expected to happen, so real estate, art, physical infrastructure, private credit at scale, well, things didn't really go according to plans, right? And I want to be fair here. There are some projects in these categories, some of them are actually good with good founders, but the volume they make nine years in is still like a rounding error compared to the volume of those three. And it's kind of backwards because it's not what everybody was expecting, you know, in 2017, when we were speaking about like tokenization and RWAs, everybody thought real estate was going to go next because everybody thought, okay, illiquid assets are the ones that most could benefit from liquidity on chain. In reality, what happened is that the most standardized, most liquid, and most heavily traded instruments in finance were the ones that actually went on chain, you know, and uh it's kind of weird, in my opinion, because these instruments were already working fine before going on chain. And so I thought my I thought, well, let's try to find out why this happened. And here I want to present two numbers that are kind of different. They are both from this year, but they represent two different things and it's quite important. On one side, we have tokenized equities or tokenized stocks, as I was mentioning earlier. As I said, roughly 2.3 billion of volume volume and they traded roughly 23 billion dollars of volume. So, they basically turned over 10 times their value in the last 30 days. And then on the other side, we have large RWAs in general, you know, so like tokenized funds, treasuries, private credit. Among these, among the largest of these, which is where most of the value sits, by the way. More than half, basically, recorded zero transfers in a week. Not low volume, zero. And I mean, if you look at these, they normally have the same chains, the same standards, even the same infrastructure sometimes. One moves quite fast, the other is almost not moving at all, you know? And so, it's kind of weird, also this thing. And by the way, it's not criticism, because actually the stillness is not failure. The fact that the large RWAs are not moving much makes perfect sense. If you are holding tokenized treasuries, you are the holding them for the yield. That's the whole point about it. So, I was asking myself, why if they have an identical wrapper, the token, did wrapper is producing different things, different outcomes, you know? It that means that the wrapper, the token, is not providing the liquidity, but is not even preventing it. It's simply not the variable at all. What is bringing liquidity is who holds these assets and what they are going to do with these assets. And those two things existed before anyone tokenized anything. So, the question is what those three categories, you know, treasuries, money market funds, and short-dated credit had in common before the token and not after it to make them successful on chain? Well, they mainly had three things. First of all, a price that somebody else is set, you know, continuously observable, made by the market and not by an issuer. And this is quite important, because if the price is made by an issuer, you have to trust the issuer, and then you have to do some independent verification of what he's pricing. But, treasury tokenized treasuries or treasury bills, like there are thousands of people pricing them. So, it's the market that is pricing them. And the the token just inherited that price. The second thing is a legal wrapper that somehow already function, you know? So, that means the treasuries, funds, notes, they were legal constructs way before they were tokens. Somebody had already figured out who was entitled to hold them, which court would come in in case of insolvency, and what would happen, and what this court court could enforce, basically, you know? So, the token itself inherited a structure that was already there made by people that were basically going to court before and losing or winning. So, that's not kind of a small thing like in small inheritance. This where most of the value sits. And third, we had a buyer base, you know? And this is what we saw also at the beginning. Buyer base is basically who holds the token, people that understand what they are holding, and that they are entitled to hold it, you know? And so, this one is what normally gets missed most of the times, but is the one that determines that liquidity. Liquidity is basically a property of the buyer base. It has never been a property of the instrument. And you cannot really engineer your way to a bit. If you If you tokenize something nobody wants, you end up with a token nobody wants. You just get there faster. And so, let me be clear of what tokenization did and did not do. Tokenization made for sure those assets move move better, you know? So, it definitely like cheaper transfers, higher transparency, easier custody, faster settlement. Those are all good things that happened. What it did not do is it did not create any of those three things, the price, the legal wrapper, and the buyer base, that were needed to make them work on chain. Those were already there, each one of them. So, we talked about the easy assets to tokenize so far. Let's now talk about the harder ones, you know? And so, let's take assets that basically have none of those properties, no price, no legal wrapper, no buyer base, and on top of that, they can also stop working. And let me be clear here. I'll take the example of solar and battery storage farms, which is what I work on, to explain basically what it means that the asset fails. What When an asset fails, it doesn't mean that price goes down, you know, that's that's not the point. What can happen is basically, for example, that the equipment degrades faster than the manufacturer told you it would, or that the person that is buying the output stops paying you. Or, for example, there is a grid connection that lapses because somebody forgot a deadline that was written in a document nobody read properly. Or, let's say the sneaky one is that everything is functioning, the revenue comes in, and it's half what you were expecting. So, nothing broke, nobody defaulted, everything is working perfectly fine, just is just earning less. And this is kind of something that doesn't happen with bonds, you know, a bond is very more binary. Either it pays or it defaults, you know? And both are well understood. In In case of a physical asset, instead, you can basically have this physical asset that is underperforming for a decade, and nothing gets triggered because the asset is working, it's just earning less, and you don't realize that it is that this there's something wrong. And so, basically, the problem here is a problem of visibility because on a good day, both a good and a bad claim or a good and a bad structure, they look identical. They have properties that are exactly the same. Both the good and the bad one settle in seconds. It's clear who who can hold them, basically, and so there is a transparency, very clear for both of them. Both are cheap to transfer. Any observable property is basically the same. You find out if you're holding a good structure or a bad structure on a bad day. But the problem is on a bad day, none of those things are going to help you. And so, I I want to maybe add a word here about claims because I'm going to use this word quite a lot from here and it's important we understand what claim a claim you really is. A claim basically is a legal way of answering the question, "Who owes me and what do exactly do they owe me?" You know? So, it's not who holds the token, is who sits on the other side of the promise, basically, and what can a court actually force them to do in case there is a dispute. And so, the questions that really are important to answer are basically these ones, you know, the ones in black, you know? Who do I have a claim against? Under which country and under which law? Basically, how much is it worth it? And how long does enforcement take? And to be clear, tokenized stocks can have a bad day, too. I mean, companies fail. Yeah, this this is normal and it can happen. The only difference is that for them, someone found already the answers to those difficult questions and those questions that matters decades ago and the token just inherited those answers. So, now this brings me to the question of what the claim where the claim actually lives, you know, what what what is it the claim and where it lives. And I think the important the important thing here is and I want to leave you with this, probably, is that moving the token is a settled problem. Is generally settled, you know? Like uh transfer, transparency, custody, settlement, these are all good things that we managed to solve. But knowing what the holder can actually claim against whom and in which country is definitely not a settled problem, you know? And for a financial instrument, you never had to find out this stuff because you inherited it. But for a physical asset, you didn't inherit anything. You have to solve this problem every single time. And there is a sharper version of this, probably, which is basically that a block chain in a block chain and block chain entry can be practically impossible to change, which, let's say in engineering terms, is immutable, you know? But legal finality, let's say finality, is not a block chain problem, is a is a legal one. And it's the point after which no one can basically reverse a claim. And and this is basically something that does not come from cryptography, it comes from statute. And this is not criticism, by the way, it's just that the old machinery works. In Europe, we have the finality settlement framework dated from 1998 that basically lists lists There is a list of named designated systems, and if your instrument is on that list, the settlement is basically untouchable, you know? And something similar exists also in the United States with the bankruptcy protections. So, these are old, slow, and unglamorous systems, but they work because they have been tested in court. The new machinery, block chain, is technically superior, actually, but is legally weaker. And so, a chain can actually be cheaper, you know, be faster, and basically be impossible to alter. So, all good things compared to the old machinery. However, this can still carry less legal value than the thing they're trying to replace, basically. And so, I would say if if we want in a word, we can we can basically say that immutability is an engineering topic or problem. Finality is a legal one. And having the first, immutability, doesn't automatically give you the second, which is finality. And so, the question that you might ask me now is, "Okay, so is it really worth it trying to tokenize these hard assets?" Well, and the answer is yes. First of all, because otherwise we would have lost the last 15 minutes of our lives. And second, because like once you manage to tokenize these assets, you get something that the easy assets that you try to tokenize will not give you. And I'll use once again the example of uh solar and battery storage farms because it's it's easier to explain. So, you get basically three properties from these assets. You get uncorrelated assets. So, basically a payment that comes from electricity doesn't really care about funding rates, you know? If you think of what happens with on-chain yield right now, it's mainly you are exposed to crypto risk in a in a different shape. You can have collateral risk, you can have leverage, you can have liquidity constraints, you can have funding rates. And all of these degrades in the same way. An electricity payment does not. You get assets that are insurable. So, there is a physical thing that you can inspect before you buy it, that you can insure while you hold it, that basically you can repair if it stops working, and that can be repossessed if everything else goes wrong. While you cannot repossess a governance token. And finally, you get assets that are durable. Which means that revenue coming from you know, electricity sales is something that doesn't go away because it comes from real economy, you know? Like you have consumers and businesses that still need electricity. While in other cases you have a revenue that basically comes from a market that has to keep believing, you know? So, I would say that tokenizing these assets is hard. Yes, it is. But if you manage to do it, you end up holding something that has a completely different risk profile from everything else that you have in your portfolio. And that's why it's worth trying to do it. And this is basically what I'm building at Megawatt. You know, if you remember the first sentence that I mentioned at the very beginning, I said that we finance utility scale solar and battery storage across Central and Southeastern Europe. Ready to build project funding through construction, each one sitting in its own company. If you analyze this sentence, you basically have the three characteristics that I mentioned at the beginning. The one that you need The ones that you need to tokenize assets. The price, the legal wrapper, and the buyers. So, you have the price, basically, right? So, the what the position is worth. And it's basically measured from metered output. So, there is a meter on each and every farm that basically measures and tell you how much revenue it's being produced, how much energy it is being produced. And this is basically published continuously, not quarterly like in other instruments, because when you have an asset that has no operating history, like a newly built farm, data is what basically builds trust. We're building the legal wrapper, right? So, built per asset in the country where the farm is going to be built and is going to sit and under this country's law. And finally, I'm building the buyers base, you know? So, it's assembled one by one, one for each farm. None of it is inherited. All of it is built from scratch. And yeah, the Basically, the idea here is that the engineering was never the constraint, right? So, let me let me explain a bit better this slide. This is what I want to finish with today. None of what I said so far has anything to do with what has been built, you know? The The The infrastructure is good, you know, settlement, custody, uh transfer, all of that are things that are way better than what came before. But, there are other things that need to be done in order to be able for this infrastructure to carry these assets. And all these things are non-technical. If we think about what happened with containerization, uh I mean, containerization looked inevitable since 1956, you know, when the first container was shipped. Uh but, it still took like roughly 30 years to revolutionize global trade. Why? Because you had a lot of issues that you had solved. You know, you had unions that you had to negotiate with, ports that needed to be rebuilt, you know, you had insurers that had to find out how to underwrite something that is not inspectable. Like, containers are not difficult, but back then, nobody really knew how to handle them. And you had basically customs that had to agree between them what a shipment even was. So, all of these things basically was a legal, commercial, and institutional problem, you know? And we are at the same point right now. As I said, the engineering was never a constraint. It was just the part that everyone could see. What is left to do right now is legal, is commercial, and is low. And it's worth doing. Thank you.