2025’s Real-World Asset Tokenisation Boom: What It Means for Crypto, FinTech & Web3 Hiring

5 December 2025

Most teams in digital assets don’t need another “what is RWA?” blog.
We’re all living it: MiCA, DSS, tokenised treasuries, private credit, bank paper – it’s already in our roadmaps and board decks.
The interesting question now is: how is this cycle reshaping the leadership and hiring decisions we’re making?

The backdrop is clear enough. Real-world asset (RWA) tokenisation has moved from pilot to infrastructure.
Institutional programmes are live, regulators have stopped speaking in hypotheticals, and the numbers are finally non-trivial.

RedStone’s H1 2025 Real-World Assets in Onchain Finance report has tokenised RWAs (ex-stablecoins) going from $15.2B at the end of 2024 to more than $24B by June 2025 – roughly 85% year-on-year growth, validated by other looks at the same rwa.xyz data.¹
By late August, broader estimates put the market closer to $26.44B, with tokenised Treasuries printing new highs and holder counts stepping up again.²

On the institutional side, BlackRock’s BUIDL has turned into a multi-billion-dollar tokenised Treasury fund and is now accepted as collateral on Binance.^3,4
OCBC is running a $1B digital USCP programme on-chain.⁵
The UK’s Digital Securities Sandbox is open, and the Treasury has just dropped a fast-track licence regime to give serious fintech and digital-asset teams more room to move.^6,7

From conversations we’re having at
RecruitBlock with founders, COOs and boards in London, Gibraltar and beyond, this is less about “can we?” and more about
“who do we need around the table to run this properly?”

What follows isn’t a primer – it’s a snapshot of the signals we’re all seeing, and the hiring patterns that seem to be working for teams leaning into RWAs.

1. Six 2025 signals that are quietly steering hiring decisions

These are the datapoints that keep coming up in hiring discussions – not because they’re “news”, but because they change where capital, regulators and talent are focusing their attention.

1. Tokenised RWAs push past $24–26 billion

• RedStone’s H1 2025 report has tokenised RWAs (excluding stablecoins) moving from $15.2B at the end of 2024 to beyond $24B by June 2025 – with private credit and tokenised Treasuries leading that growth.¹
• AInvest’s read of CoinGecko numbers puts broader RWA market cap around $26.44B by 22 August 2025, with tokenised Treasuries at fresh highs and holder counts up almost 14% in a single month.²

2. BlackRock’s BUIDL is the RWA bellwether

• BUIDL crossed $1B AUM in March 2025, only weeks after launch.³
• By mid-year, tokenised Treasury market cap was estimated around $5.6B, with BUIDL sitting somewhere in the $2–2.5B range and roughly 40–45% share.^3,8
  Cointelegraph’s data puts BlackRock and a handful of peers at around 88% of total tokenised Treasury issuance.¹⁵

3. BUIDL becomes collateral on Binance

• On 14 November 2025, Binance and BlackRock announced that institutional clients can post BUIDL as off-exchange collateral for trading, using regulated third-party custodians – with a new BNB Chain share class alongside.⁴
• For teams managing both treasury and trading, that changes how people think about liquidity, risk and the boundaries between “fund assets” and “market collateral”.

4. Banks are issuing tokenised funding at scale

• OCBC’s US$1B digital USCP programme is live, with near-instant USD funding via blockchain and J.P. Morgan’s Digital Debt Service as dealer.⁵
• It sits alongside a conventional CP stack in the tens of billions – tokenised issuance is being pulled into the funding stack, not kept off in a sandbox.⁵

5. The UK builds tokenisation rails – and speeds up licences

• The UK’s Digital Securities Sandbox (DSS) is open, via a joint policy statement from the Bank of England and FCA.⁶
  Issuance, trading and settlement on DLT, but in a supervised, live environment.
• On 4 December 2025, the Treasury followed up with a fast-track licensing regime giving qualifying firms up to 18 months of provisional permissions while they work towards full authorisation.⁷

6. R3 & Solana bridge permissioned and public

• In May 2025, R3 and Solana Foundation announced a partnership to bring regulated institutions and more than $10B of tokenised assets from Corda environments onto Solana through a new interoperability service.⁹
• That’s another data point in the “public and private are converging” story – which feeds directly into the kind of engineering, product and risk profiles teams are looking for.

2. Regulation has stopped being hypothetical – and it shows up in who we hire

MiCA, CASP authorisations and the new normal for EU entities

MiCA is “on” rather than “coming”. ESMA’s
Supervisory Briefing on CASP authorisation (Jan 2025) has become required reading for anyone thinking about an EU-facing entity.¹⁰

• Substance – regulators want real people and operations in-country.¹¹
• Governance – boards and SMFs are expected to be genuinely competent on crypto and digital assets.¹¹
• Outsourcing – critical functions can’t just be pushed offshore and forgotten about.^11,12

On top of that, ESMA has already called out CASPs for using MiCA status to halo unregulated activity, and has criticised at least one national licensing regime for being too light-touch.^13,14
Unsurprisingly, this is pushing teams to bring in serious compliance, risk and governance leadership earlier in the build-out.

UK: DSS + fast-track licences = new expectations for leadership

In the UK, DSS participation and the fast-track regime point in a similar direction: move faster, but show that the people in charge know what they’re doing.^6,7

For founders and boards, that’s changing the sequencing of hires:

• Regulatory and risk leadership being brought in ahead of applications, not afterwards.
• People placed in named roles with clear accountability to the FCA and BoE.

It feels less like “regulation vs innovation” and more like “the rules are finally concrete enough that we can design teams around them”.

3. Where RWA tokenisation is clustering demand for talent

Across the roles we’re working on at
RecruitBlock, four areas keep coming up whenever tokenisation enters the conversation.

3.1 Tokenised treasuries & on-chain liquidity

On-chain Treasuries are now big enough to matter.
Mid-2025 numbers put the segment around $5–7B, with BUIDL consistently holding ~40–45% and a small group of issuers responsible for almost 90% of all tokenised Treasuries.^3,8,15

In that corner of the market, the roles that keep surfacing look like:

• RWA product leads / tokenisation PMs across Treasuries, MMFs and structured fixed income.
• Institutional coverage & partnerships leads who can sit between fund structure, capital efficiency and DeFi integrations.
• Collateral, treasury & risk ops leads comfortable with both triparty arrangements and digital custody models.

3.2 Private credit, mortgages and real estate

RedStone and CryptoNews have private credit as the largest single RWA vertical, with tokenised loans, home-equity and credit strategies making up a big chunk of that ~$24B.^1,16
Teams building there tend to be looking for:

• Credit & structuring specialists with securitisation and collateral experience who are happy to work with smart contracts and on-chain data.
• Risk and valuation leads who can price and monitor these instruments across on- and off-chain signals.
• Origination & distribution heads who can talk to private credit LPs, banks and on-chain liquidity partners in the same week.

3.3 Bank-grade digital securities & tokenised funding

Between OCBC’s digital USCP, tokenised structured notes at banks like DBS and the first wave of DSS applicants, tokenisation is starting to look like part of the core capital markets stack rather than an innovation lab project.^5,2,6
The R3 / Solana collaboration adds an explicit public-chain angle to that institutional infrastructure story.⁹

Here, the hiring market skews towards:

• C-suite and MD-level leadership (Head of Tokenisation, Chief Digital Assets Officer, Digital Markets MD).
• Market-structure and platform specialists with deep experience of CSDs, CCPs, settlement and issuance – and an appetite for re-platforming that into DLT.
• Programme / change leads who have shipped regulated infrastructure under central bank / securities regulator oversight.

3.4 Compliance, risk & financial crime – built for RWAs

With MiCA live, DSS open and supervisors speaking publicly about crypto firms and licensing quality, compliance and risk hires are no longer back-fill decisions – they’re first-wave appointments.^{6,10,13,14,17}

Typical patterns we’re seeing:

• MiCA / CASP Heads of Compliance with genuine autonomy and board access in EU entities.
• Digital-asset AML & investigations leads focused on flows across RWAs, stablecoins and DeFi.
• UK digital-asset regulation / DSS specialists who are comfortable being the point people with regulators.

4. The skill mix that keeps making it onto shortlists

Different companies are hiring into different shapes, but four themes show up again and again in the people who make it through final rounds for senior RWA-related roles.

1. Fluent in both TradFi and DeFi.
   Comfortable talking duration, liquidity and capital ratios, and equally comfortable talking composability, bridges and protocol risk.
2. Regulation-first, product-driven.
   They can operate within MiCA, DORA, DSS and fast-track frameworks without losing sight of commercial outcomes.^6,7,10,11
3. Security and risk literacy baked in.
   They know where systems tend to fail – custody, key management, infra, smart-contract assumptions – and factor that into design.
4. Experience executing in grey zones.
   They’ve shipped into partially defined regimes before, iterating with regulators as rules evolved.

5. Founder-level moves we’re seeing work

Every team is different, but a few patterns keep showing up in the RWA conversations we’re having with founders and boards.

5.1 Treat tokenisation as cross-functional by default

Where it works best, tokenisation isn’t a side project in “innovation” – it’s something product, legal, risk, treasury, engineering and ops share ownership of.
Mapping out who owns what, by asset class, tends to surface where the real hiring gaps are.

5.2 Bring regulatory leadership in early

MiCA, DSS and the UK fast-track regime all assume there are identifiable humans responsible for key functions when you engage with regulators.^6,7,10,11
Teams that hire MLROs, Heads of Risk and local directors ahead of applications seem to have smoother journeys than teams that treat those roles as afterthoughts.

5.3 Build globally from day one

The teams leaning into RWAs successfully tend to be global by design:
leadership and regulatory talent in hubs like London, the EU or Gibraltar;
engineering and ops where the best builders are;
compliance and financial crime capability in markets with deep banking and payments experience.

6. For senior operators: positioning into the RWA cycle

If you’re already senior in finance, legal, risk, product or ops and you’re looking at RWAs as your next move, most of what you need is already in your track record – it’s more a case of surfacing it clearly.

• Anchor your story in assets, not jargon.
  Which balance sheets, structures and markets have you worked on, and how do they map to tokenised versions?
• Be specific on regulation.
  It helps when you can talk concretely about how MiCA, DSS or UK licensing changes alter risk, reporting and product design, not just list acronyms.
• Show cross-functional wins.
  Examples where you’ve played the connective tissue between product, legal, risk, tech and commercial teams land well.
• Point to actions, not just interest.
  Advisory work, pilots, working groups – anything that shows you’ve already leaned into RWAs – all add weight.

“In a tightening funding and regulatory environment, credible leadership is the ultimate moat.
The next wave of RWA leaders will be the ones who can speak to regulators in the morning and DeFi protocols in the afternoon.”

References

RedStone – Real-World Assets in Onchain Finance: H1 2025 Market Overview

CryptoNews – Private Credit Drives $24 Billion Tokenized RWA Boom

Cointelegraph – Tokenized RWAs Surge to $24B in 2025

AInvest – Tokenized Treasuries Surpass 2025 High as RWA Market Hits $26.44 Billion

Cointelegraph – BlackRock and Five Others Account for 88% of Tokenized Treasuries

Bitcoin.com – BlackRock’s BUIDL Soars 50% in 6 Days, Passes $1B AUM

PR Newswire – BUIDL Now Accepted as Collateral for Trading on Binance

Binance – Integration of BlackRock’s BUIDL as Off-Exchange Collateral

OCBC – US$1 Billion Digital US Commercial Paper Programme on Blockchain

FCA – PS24/12: Digital Securities Sandbox Policy Statement

Bank of England – Joint Approach to the Digital Securities Sandbox

ESMA – Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) Overview

ESMA – Supervisory Briefing on Authorisation of CASPs under MiCA

WH Partners – MiCA Insights: Must-Know Rules for CASPs

Blockchain Working Group – ESMA Supervisory Briefing and Best Practices

Reuters – ESMA Warns Crypto Firms Not to Mislead Customers on MiCA-Regulated Products

Reuters – EU Regulator Criticises Malta’s Crypto Licensing Process

Reuters – Britain Unveils Fast-Track Licensing to Boost Fintech Growth

R3 – Strategic Shift to Deliver Internet Capital Markets with Solana Foundation