Crypto’s Not-so-Secret Weapon? Real World Assets About to Go Full Larry David

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What to know:

Alright, here’s the deal: you’re reading yet another crypto newsletter. Crypto Long & Short. That’s what they’re calling it. You want the hot takes? Sign up, don’t sign up, what do I care? They’ll email you. Every Wednesday. On time, unlike my plumber.

Everybody, and I mean everybody, is looking for yield on-chain. Yield, yield, yield. I get it. Suddenly no one wants to work, they just want their coins making babies while they nap. So the new big thing? Real World Assets. RWAs. They sound fancy, but really, they’re just assets… from the world. The real world. Apparently, this is revolutionary now. 🧐

Tokenized treasuries? Private credit? Let me translate: Wall Street with extra steps and more passwords. You bring that off-chain yield on-chain and *bam*, instant stability. Crypto folks love it. They call it “strong performance.” I call it “not losing all your money in a dog token.”

Top crypto categories by market cap

Want stats? Go to CoinGecko. They love stats.

But here’s the thing: so far, all this RWA stuff? It’s just copying traditional finance. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, or maybe it’s just lazy. Investors want more! They want returns that don’t swing up and down like my blood pressure at Thanksgiving. They hate middlemen. They want “composability,” which really just means putting financial LEGO bricks together until you get a yacht. Or a lawsuit.

Now, the new thing making people ~excited~ is tokenized reinsurance. Oh boy. Makes you want to jump out of bed in the morning, right? Reinsurance! 🥱

For the normal person, reinsurance is basically insurance for insurance companies. You never hear about it unless something’s gone horribly wrong. Most investors? Haven’t even heard of it, let alone touched it. It’s been locked away behind so many closed doors, even I couldn’t find it—and I once got locked in a parking garage for three hours.

Let’s put some numbers to this, so you know I’m not making it up:

  • There’s $770B propping up $460B in premiums. Big numbers, yes, much wow.
  • Soon, it’ll be $2 trillion in capital. Who came up with these numbers? Someone with very big pockets, probably.
  • That extra $740B in new premiums? That’s not chump change, unless you’re Jeff Bezos’ accountant.

Now, thanks to “new infrastructure” (fancy words for lines of code written at 3 AM by someone in pajamas), you can finally get in on this supposedly exclusive club. Here’s the pitch: grab a fancy stablecoin with a name like “sUSDe” (rolls right off the tongue, doesn’t it?), merge it with some tokenized reinsurance stuff, and now you’ve got a “structured product.” It’ll make money no matter what the market does — or so they claim. It’s like a financial Swiss Army knife, but also a little like playing Jenga with your retirement fund.

Meanwhile, old-school reinsurance was all hush-hush, private deals, everyone in the room pretending they knew what was going on. But now: Web3. Everything’s quick, transparent, and slightly confusing. Capital can zip in and out faster than me leaving an awkward dinner party.

Here’s the rub: tokenized reinsurance shows RWAs aren’t just copying TradFi, they’re trying to go full crypto. New, weirder financial products, maybe a little more risky, maybe a little more rewarding, definitely a little more confusing. There’s access, there’s transparency, there’s resilience — whatever that means. 🍀

If you want to see where all this is heading, it’s toward mashing together old-school finance and crypto — almost like making a sandwich with two things you’re not sure go together. But guess what? Maybe it’ll work. Maybe it won’t. That’s crypto, baby. And if you lose your shirt, don’t call me — call Ethena, or better yet, your mother.

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2025-06-18 19:35