RockawayX's $150 million goes to tokenized credit's exit problem

Roughly $38 billion of bonds, equities and funds now sit onchain, more than half of it tokenized money-market funds holding instruments nobody has any trouble pricing, per RWA.xyz, and RockawayX is directing $150 million at a different problem: the rest.

The $2 billion digital-asset investment firm told CoinDesk it is rolling out Catapult, a program that will supply venture funding, product structuring, liquidity, market making and distribution to tokenized credit products. Its target sectors are trade and supply-chain finance, specialty asset-backed securities, CLOs and real-estate-related credit — paper that today sits in private credit funds, insurance portfolios and bank balance sheets, reaching a public market only in small, negotiated size.

Four of those five functions — structuring, liquidity, market making, distribution — sit on the sell side of the trade, a more precise statement of where a digital-asset firm thinks the work is than the category label suggests. Chief executive Viktor Fischer makes the point directly: "The hard part of RWAs was never tokenization. It's everything after: who buys the asset, where it trades and what happens when someone needs to get out."

The staffing plan follows from that: RockawayX wants traditional finance professionals who can originate and underwrite the underlying credit paired with crypto-native operators who can structure and distribute it onchain, a division of labor that treats the loan officer, not the smart-contract developer, as the scarce input. Fischer's stated yield target is 12% plus, uncorrelated to crypto, and that number cannot be engineered into existence with a better wrapper; it has to be originated in trade finance and specialty ABS, one borrower at a time, by people who can say no. "Our thesis going forward that after trading, yield will be the largest use case onchain," he told CoinDesk.

None of this is a standing start: RockawayX runs early-stage venture funds, a market-neutral fund that supplies liquidity to DeFi protocols, and a vault business with roughly $300 million in deployed capital, and in August it acquired the crypto hedge fund Relayer. Catapult reads less as a new strategy than an assembly of pieces the firm already owns. Against a forecast that puts the tokenized real-world asset market at $10 trillion to $20 trillion by 2030, $150 million is a seeding budget rather than a position.

The forecast is where the real argument sits, and RockawayX's $10 trillion to $20 trillion range for 2030 runs well past Citi analysts' $5.5 trillion base case for the end of the decade — a spread between a bank's model and a crypto firm's target larger than honest disagreement usually gets. Citi has crossed this desk's coverage 25 times this year, and its number is the base case the crypto side is arguing against.

Where the two forecasts agree is that the assets have to come from offchain credit markets, which makes the second-order questions the ones that matter. Fischer's argument is that market makers can create an exit even when the underlying investment carries a lengthy redemption period, which holds when there is a price to work from; CLOs and specialty ABS are quoted markets that thin fastest at the moment holders most want out, and the program's own structure concedes the point by making liquidity and market making two of its five functions. A bid is only as good as the desk standing behind it, and on this collateral the desk is a handful of dealers, some of whom have never traded a tokenized CLO tranche.

This publication has argued that tokenized securities are graduating from pilots to products, and the private-credit version of that graduation now has dedicated capital behind it. The regulatory clock is not what gates it. The SEC's five-year innovation exemption created a venue class for tokenized U.S. equities, and a dead market-structure bill in the Senate pulls the tokenization calendar forward rather than parking it. What tokenized private credit lacks is the equivalent of that venue class — somewhere a position with a multi-year redemption profile finds a price in a week, not a quarter.

MoonPay's shelf of tokenized funds and Morpho's use of tokenized stocks as collateral are the same question asked from opposite ends — what a token is for after it has been minted — and Catapult answers with distribution and a quote.

The $150 million reads less as a statement of conviction about market size than as a cheap option on being the middleman: if 12%-plus uncorrelated paper does move onchain in size, the firms holding the underwriting and the secondary quote collect whether the market lands at Citi's $5.5 trillion or RockawayX's $20 trillion, and $150 million spread across five functions buys a seat at the table while the table is still being built. That makes the $300 million vault book the number to watch, because if Catapult-originated credit turns up there before it turns up against a published two-way price, the firm will have bought itself a balance sheet where it meant to build a market.