If blockchain is a highway, tokens are the cars. Both are essential to transport, but nobody sees a Ferrari humming down the interstate and says, “Wow, that’s a beautiful highway. I can’t believe how smoothly that highway is moving the Ferarri down the road. Look at how the asphalt gradient wicks away rainwater to keep it safe.”
But while the bros salivate over a six-figure sports car, a tycoon cashes a check from the highway department.
Because that $120k car is speeding down a road that costs $6 million per mile to build.
Without infrastructure, the flashy Ferarri is useless.
During the hype cycle, tokens were the center of attention, driving project value and fueling speculative mania. However, the market crash marked a significant shift. With token launches no longer as easy or profitable, innovation focused on infrastructure and practical applications of blockchain.
And that’s when the real wealth creation began.
Blockchain’s most valuable applications—cybersecurity, identity, privacy, remittances, real estate, payments, markets, and supply chain management—became the focal point for developers, governments, and institutions.
In this quieter, more thoughtful phase, blockchain evolved into a tool to solve real-world problems. From tokenizing assets like real estate to state-issued stablecoins and blockchain-secured contracts, crypto’s true impact is becoming evident, and its inclusion in the tech stack is ubiquitous.
We enter the era of adoption.
You’re about to read part two of a three-part love letter from blockchain technology to investors. (read part one)
It’s the story of how crypto evolved in silence, laying the foundation for its most important chapter yet—and why now is the perfect time to pay attention again.
It’s also the investment thesis behind Altea’s newest–and most impactful–investment opportunity yet.
With CryptoONE, we’re picking the highest-potential early-stage blockchain startups solving real-world problems and betting on them to ride the blockchain wave through its next fundamental phase – widespread institutional adoption.
Can’t Wait? Register your interest in CrytoONE now.
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Table of Contents
Stablecoins and State-Issued Tokens
Understanding Stablecoins: Blockchain’s Utility Layer
Stablecoins are digital currencies designed to maintain a consistent value by being pegged to stable assets like traditional currencies or commodities. Unlike other cryptocurrencies, whose volatility has limited their use in everyday transactions, stablecoins provide the reliability necessary for real-world applications.
First introduced in 2014 with Tether, stablecoins gained traction as a way to stabilize crypto markets and facilitate seamless trading. By 2024, they had evolved into indispensable tools, acting as “digital dollars on the blockchain, “enabling everything from cross-border payments to decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols.
Wyoming Stable Token (WYST): A State-Led Innovation
The Wyoming Stable Token (WYST) represents a bold leap forward in state-level blockchain integration. Unlike central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), WYST is a fully USD-backed stablecoin issued by the state of Wyoming, prioritizing privacy and user control.
Each WYST token is backed 1:1 by US dollars held in trust by the state, ensuring redemption at full value. Managed by the Wyoming Stable Token Commission, WYST combines public accountability with blockchain efficiency. Unlike CBDCs, which pose surveillance concerns, WYST is designed to operate as a privacy-preserving digital dollar. Wyoming law requires that WYST be at least 100% backed by US Dollars, offering a fully reserved, bankruptcy-remote stable token.
Use Cases Driving Adoption
Stablecoins like WYST simplify cross-border payments, enabling instant, peer-to-peer transactions with minimal fees, bypassing the delays and costs of traditional systems. For remittances, stablecoins dramatically reduce fees, which currently average 6% in conventional channels, to under 1%, enabling faster and more affordable transfers.
Stablecoins are also unlocking AI-driven economic activity. Autonomous agents, from AI assistants to trading bots, use stablecoins to transact, book services, or manage portfolios without human intervention, expanding the potential for digital commerce.
Programmable Yield Stablecoins: The Next Frontier
New stablecoins embed yield-generating mechanisms directly into their designs. Programmable stablecoins like Noble’s USDN distribute interest from underlying investments, such as US Treasury bills, to holders. This innovation transforms stablecoins from passive tools into active, income-generating assets, paving the way for programmable money to revolutionize financial ecosystems.
Imagine holding a digital dollar that retains value and grows passively over time. These innovations could transform stablecoins into one of the most powerful tools in modern finance.
Real Estate Tokenization
Tokenization: Unlocking the World’s Largest Asset Class
Real estate, valued at $340 trillion globally, has long suffered from illiquidity, opaque processes, and high entry barriers. Tokenization addresses these challenges by digitizing assets, allowing automation, transparency, and streamlined transactions. In common usage, tokenization–broadly bringing an asset onto the blockchain–is generally used interchangeably with fractionalization, which creates fractionalized interests in a property.
These processes are quite different and pose distinct regulatory and technical challenges. The crypto winter has been especially helpful in underscoring this distinction. In recent years, we’ve seen the development of infrastructure, tooling, and specialization to overcome obstacles to adopting on-chain real estate and real-world assets (RWAs).
Fractionalization divides properties into smaller, tradable shares, enabling partial ownership interests like stocks. Fractionalized and traded real estate is generally considered to be a security. Like securities, historic real estate fractionalization structures have tracked closely to stocks, opting to circumvent the tenuous relationship between the underlying asset (real estate) and the interests therein (LP shares) by simply tokenizing the corporation that owns the real estate.
This approach, born out of practicality, didn’t answer the question, “What is the token?” Is the token a claim to an interest in real estate, a representation of fractional ownership, a representation of an interest in the ownership entity, or the actual interest in the entity?
Tokenization is the predecessor step of fractionalization, creating a digital representation of the capital asset, which can then be fractionalized. While generally not a security, tokenization involves a separate set of problems that must be overcome: how does the token interact with the capital asset, how is the data updated, and under what authority is it minted? As the substrate for fractionalization, these questions required clear answers to catalyze real-world asset tokenization. Over the past 4 years, projects have emerged that met these challenges head-on, adding technical, regulatory, and operational tooling to realize the RWA vision. As this tooling matures and institutions increasingly tokenize assets, we will see a Cambrian explosion in the RWA space.
Transforming the Real Estate Market
Once tokenized, the world’s largest asset class will benefit from on-chain atomic settlement. An industry defined by opacity that thrives on returns derived from information asymmetry will witness greater transparency than public markets. Capital stacks will become composable, and entirely new trading vectors will emerge. REITs (Real Estate Investment Trusts) will see competition from private, highly transparent, tokenized offerings that allow for asset-level investment in property rather than the investment within real estate companies, whose share value reflects the aggregate of all the entity’s assets and liabilities. This granular level of access to assets provides an avenue for investors to focus on specific properties and will drive competition for GPs to increase operational efficiency. Builders will create derivative products effortlessly, allowing for ETF-style investments across debt and equity interests in real estate; transaction fees and settlement periods will be massively reduced, and entirely new trading vectors will emerge from newly available asset information.
Smart Contracts, Automation, and Trade
What Are Smart Contracts?
Smart contracts are self-executing agreements encoded on the blockchain. They automate processes and enforce terms without intermediaries. These contracts reduce human error, prevent fraud, and enable complex workflows across industries.
Applications Across Industries
Smart contracts are revolutionizing industries such as financial services, automating compliance, and simplifying dispute resolution. In supply chain management, contracts embedded with IoT data release payments automatically upon verified delivery, reducing fraud and improving efficiency. Wills, Estates, and Trusts are beginning to leverage smart contracts to transform abstract rule sets from “mandates” to deterministic, self-executing code. Importantly, because smart contracts operate upon on-chain, verified data, they provide a foundation to build reliable automation triggered by verifiable behavior. Workflows like investor onboarding, KYC, KYB, AML, funding of investments, deployment of capital, and provisioning of resources tied to these events can be streamlined and automated. Artificial intelligence and AI agents can reliably interact with smart contracts, creating a framework for the new digital workforce to generate previously unfathomable efficiency with concrete guardrails and built-in compliant, real-time audit trails. Fraud, waste, and abuse across sectors, from government to small businesses, will be significantly reduced as probabilistic legal agreements are replaced by or imbued with deterministic smart contracts.
Decentralized Finance (DeFi) Integration
Decentralized finance (DeFi) replaces traditional intermediaries with blockchain-based protocols, enabling borrowing, lending, and trading without banks. This democratized model has grown into a $100 billion ecosystem driven by the principles of transparency and accessibility.
Case Study: BlackRock’s BUIDL Token
BlackRock’s USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund (BUIDL) is a tokenized money market fund focused on short-dated US Treasury bills and similar low-risk securities. Tokenized by Securitize, BUIDL enables increased liquidity and easier trading of these traditionally stable financial instruments. It offers qualified investors a stable token value of $1 per token, with daily accrued dividends distributed monthly as new tokens. The fund’s assets, fully allocated to cash, US Treasury bills, and repurchase agreements, facilitate faster settlement of financial transactions, remittances, cross-border payments, and algorithmic trading.
On November 13, 2024, BlackRock extended BUIDL to additional blockchain networks, including Aptos, Arbitrum, Avalanche, Optimism’s OP Mainnet, and Polygon. This expansion significantly broadens accessibility and functionality and enhances BUIDL’s integration with decentralized finance (DeFi) platforms and blockchain-based financial products. This multi-chain approach supports on-chain yield, peer-to-peer transfers, and real-time dividend accrual.
A cornerstone of the BUILD initiative is the “BUIDL” token. Issued to BUIDL holders who deposit their tokens with BlackRock, sBUIDL allows users to engage directly with DeFi protocols while still earning yields from their investments. This mechanism increases returns from approximately 5% to 12%. Importantly, BlackRock can liquidate the underlying BUIDL tokens to cover any shortfalls, effectively managing counterparty risk for token holders.
The demand for tokenized real-world assets (RWAs) offering stable, low-risk yields is surging. As of November 19, 2024, tokenized US Treasury debt reached approximately $2.4 billion in total value locked (TVL). BUIDL leads this market as the largest tokenized treasury fund by assets under management (AUM), totaling $540 million, compared to $450 million for the second-largest fund, FOBXXX. With global market opportunities for tokenized RWAs estimated at $30 trillion, the potential for growth in this sector is immense.
The collaborative efforts of BlackRock, Securitize, and Elixir mark a transformative advancement in financial technology. By integrating traditional financial instruments with blockchain technology, BUIDL exemplifies the growing trend of merging traditional finance with decentralized platforms. This combination enables instantaneous and transparent settlement, expanded investor access, and enhanced liquidity and trading efficiency.
The introduction of BUIDL and its ecosystem highlights a pivotal moment in finance. BUIDL blends traditional finance’s reliability with blockchain’s innovation and transparency. As the largest tokenized treasury fund, BUIDL sets the stage for a new era of financial solutions, paving the way for interconnected, efficient, and agile financial ecosystems. This initiative is transforming liquidity management and serving as a model for future financial innovations in tokenization.
Real-World Impact, Real Opportunities
Blockchain technology has moved beyond the speculative phase, delivering real-world solutions across finance, real estate, and business operations. Stablecoins like WYST are transforming payments, tokenized assets are unlocking new markets, smart contracts are automating critical workflows, and DeFi is innovating new ways to earn yield and integrate with Traditional Finance. New platforms, tooling, and technologies are being created to meet the demand of RWAs, minting new unicorns that will play pivotal roles in the future of global finance.
What’s Next?
This is just the beginning. In the next post, we’ll explore how investors can capitalize on these advancements and identify the early-stage companies poised to define crypto’s future. The applications are here, and the opportunities are immense.
In the next post, we’ll explore the investment landscape surrounding blockchain technology’s real-world applications.
Stay tuned: crypto’s most exciting chapter is just beginning.
That’s all for today. Questions? Smash the reply button.
Cheers,
John & Wyatt
