Financing summary of RWA track in the first three quarters: 26 companies received nearly US$250 million, nearly half of which were seed rounds

Original author: Nancy, PANews

RWA is one of the fastest growing segments in the market this year, with various institutions and funds competing to invest. In this article, PANews takes stock of the 26 RWA projects that have officially announced financing in 2024, which have received a total of US$250 million in funding this year, most of which are in the millions of dollars. At the same time, the investment enthusiasm for RWA has increased significantly since the second quarter of this year, and the types of projects that have received investment are quite diverse.

This year, it received $250 million in financing, and new projects are more favored

The tide of capital often reflects the development trend of the market. VCs are also inclined to look for new opportunities and new growth points in the RWA narrative. According to incomplete statistics from PANews, the 26 RWA projects that have officially announced financing this year have received a total of US$380 million in funding in the past, and have received nearly US$250 million this year alone. This figure has exceeded the US$247 million raised in the whole of last year, further highlighting the popularity of RWA this year.

In terms of financing scale, the average investment amount of these projects this year is about 10.314 million US dollars, mainly because the three highest-funded projects, Securitize, Huma Finance and Lumia, raised the overall level, receiving 47 million US dollars, 38 million US dollars and 25 million US dollars respectively, accounting for nearly half of the financing amount. The remaining projects basically raised the financing amount to millions of US dollars.

In terms of the number of financings, 10 projects have received multiple additional investments. For example, Securitize received 5 rounds of financing after its establishment in 2017, Centrifuge received 5 rounds of financing in 6 years, and Lumia completed 3 rounds of financing after its launch in 2018. This year, projects including Lumia, Zoth and MANTRA have received multiple investments in a few months. The continuous financing ability also provides greater competitive advantages for the projects.

The overall financing pace of RWA began to accelerate in May this year. A total of 11 RWA projects announced financing in May, and 7 projects disclosed investment projects in the third quarter.

In terms of the distribution of financing rounds, financing activities are mainly dominated by investments in start-up and growth stage projects, mostly seed rounds, strategic rounds and A rounds. Specifically, seed rounds are the most frequent, with 12 cases, accounting for 46.2% of the total financing; followed by 5 strategic investments, accounting for 19.2%; A rounds are 2, and the remaining 7 have not disclosed specific information. This means that capital prefers growth stage companies.

In fact, if we look closely at the establishment time of the projects, we can find that most of them have been launched for only two or three years, 62.5% of the projects were launched after 2022, and only 9 projects were launched for more than 3 years. There are also many types of RWA projects, including lending, AI, L2, real estate, stablecoins, PayFi and bonds.

Of course, behind the massive influx of capital, there are many star-level investment institutions, including well-known traditional and crypto-native institutions such as BlackRock, Nomura Holdings, Binance Labs, Circle Ventures, Coinbase Ventures and Wintermute, all of which are competing and making plans.

The market size has achieved a double-digit surge, and RWA ranks first in growth rate this year

As one of the main narratives of capital betting, RWA has gradually entered the mainstream vision and has become one of the few tracks in the encryption field with a rapid increase in market size this year.

Total RWA market capitalization excluding stablecoins Source: RWA.xyz

According to RWA.xyz data, as of September 25, the market value of RWA excluding stablecoins has exceeded $12.6 billion. Among them, the tokenized U.S. Treasury market has performed particularly well, with a market value of nearly $2.22 billion, including BlackRocks BUIDL and Franklins FOBXX, which manage approximately $520 million and $430 million respectively.

Not only that, the overall scale of the RWA track is also growing at an amazing speed. According to Artemis data, from the beginning of this year to date, the market value of RWA ranks first with a growth rate of up to 301%, far exceeding popular tracks such as MEME, AI, DeFi, and DePIN.

Source: Artemis

And the user scale of RWA is also growing rapidly. Dune data shows that the number of RWA token holders on Ethereum alone has exceeded 136,000, up 134.5% from the beginning of the year.

RWA token holders on Ethereum Source: Dune@j 1002

While the RWA ecosystem is expanding significantly, the industry also recognizes and is optimistic about the future development prospects of this track. For example, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin recently expressed his support for the idea of selling company shares in the form of tokens in association with the RWA concept, and hopes to see more diverse RWAs appear on the chain so that applications can use them without being subject to the systemic risks of a single issuer or asset class; Colin Butler, head of Polygons global institutional capital, predicts that tokenized RWA represents a $30 trillion market opportunity, and high-net-worth individuals and private equity funds will drive adoption in this area because tokenization brings liquidity and accessibility to historically illiquid asset classes; Real Vision chief crypto analyst amie Coutts said that if the current two-year compound annual growth rate of 121% continues, by 2030 we may see the value of tokenized traditional assets reach around $1.3 trillion; Standard Chartered Bank and Synpulse have also predicted that by 2034, the scale of tokenized RWA may reach $30.1 trillion.

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