Over the past 12 months, one category of digital assets has stood out above all others in terms of performance: tokenized real-world assets (RWA). This form of investment has experienced a 400% growth in market capitalization, surpassing—as a whole—other classes of cryptoassets, according to data from the Blockchain Center. Tokens that represent real-world assets, such as fiat currencies, stocks, government bonds, and real estate, are called “tokenized assets.” Precisely, the possibility of displaying government bonds as tokens has become popular. In fact, tokenized US Treasuries increased more than 450% in October 2023. There are at least 9 companies that stand out in this RWA sector. Among these stands out Franklin Templeton, a company that offers a wide range of traditional investment funds and that led the investment in tokenized Treasury bonds. There are analysts, such as Mandela Amoussou, who expect RWA tokenization to “disrupt almost all industries and reshape markets.” One of the companies that is preparing to exploit RWA is Ripple, in charge of issuing the XRP cryptocurrency. The company sees RWA tokenization as a “flourishing business” opportunity, anticipating growth in that market, Amoussou believes. The perspective of the growth of this industry is reflected in an estimate of the market value of tokenized assets that will be between 3.5 trillion dollars in a bearish scenario and 10 trillion dollars in the bullish case by the year 2030, as reported CryptoNews. In the market capitalization growth chart by currency category, RWA tokens have the lead and are closely followed by memecoins, which have experienced an increase of 286% in the last yearas can be seen in the following graph (it is worth clarifying that this is the average percentage of all the memecoins evaluated by BlockchainCenter).
Performance of all digital asset categories. Source: Blockchain Center. However, the rise of meme cryptocurrencies only occurred since February 2024, as can also be seen in the graph above. Among the notables in this segment in the first days of March were Pepe (PEPE), Shiba Inu (SHIB), dogwifhat (WIF), Bonk (BONK) and Floki Inu (FLOKI). Although these memecoins have attracted attention for their performance, their value is boosted mainly due to the bullish trend of bitcoin (BTC) which usually drags the rest of the cryptocurrencies in the market. Furthermore, they are driven by sentiment on social media and online communities, rather than solid economic fundamentals. Precisely, memecoins are followed in performance by bitcoin with a growth of its capitalization of 257% in the last year.