Financial institutions have made the final choice in favor of public blockchains, with nearly $16 billion of real asset value (RWA) allocated to open networks. The absolute leader is Ethereum, which has $15.6 billion invested, while BNB Chain and Solana lag markedly with $3.2 billion and $1.8 billion respectively. The main growth driver is tokenized funds, including treasury bills and bonds.

Against this background, the gap between distributed and representative assets becomes apparent. The former allow users to fully own and manage funds through their own wallets, the latter exist only in closed registries. Although the Canton project dominates the $352 billion segment of representative assets, experts, including Franklin Templeton’s head of innovation, point to the hopelessness of private solutions. While only 13 supervalidators are responsible for security in the Canton network, Ethereum has more than 10,000 independent nodes around the world.

But simply placing assets on an open network is not enough; it requires working mechanisms for using them.