Finoa, a regulated German cryptocurrency custodian, is set to offer clients access to tokenized, real-world assets (RWA) through Centrifuge, one of the first companies to bring non-crypto assets to blockchains.

The first RWA token is derived from one of Centrifuge's Anemoy funds, an actively managed, on-chain pool of short-term U.S. Treasury bills set up and regulated in the British Virgin Islands. The token will be available to Berlin-based Finoa's 300-plus institutional customers using the FinoaConnect wallet system, the companies said Wednesday.

There has been a rush to tokenize a universe of financial assets and present streamlined versions of them on blockchains, particularly from the traditional finance (TradFi) world of banks and institutions. The market could grow to $10 trillion by the end of the decade, digital asset management firm 21.co said in a report published in October.

The Anemoy fund share token is aimed at large decentralized finance (DeFi) investors, decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) treasuries, stablecoin protocols and the like – a point of distinction from the plethora of TradFi tokenization efforts, according to Centrifuge co-founder Martin Quensel.

"I would argue traditional finance's message for the future that trillions of dollars will be tokenized is completely disconnected from firms that are innovating with RWAs," Quensel said in an interview. "TradFi's understanding of a token as a database record doesn't make any sense to DeFi. A token is not a database record; it's code running on its own that's executable, transferable, has its own logic, rights and possibilities."

Henrik Gebbing, a co-founder of BaFin-licensed Finoa, pointed out that his institutional crypto customers routinely sit on quantities of fiat cash and stablecoins when those assets could be earning yield.

"We work with crypto foundations and large crypto investors and a lot of them sit on idle stablecoins with no interest being paid," Gebbing said in an interview. "The integration of Anemoy with FinoaConnect will provide a seamless user experience for those customers to deploy stablecoins in the tokenized T-Bill fund."

Read more: The Trillion Dollar Crypto Opportunity: Real World Asset Tokenization