[MZ TokTok] A new ladder for youth asset building 'RWA'

Yu Gi-myeong, CEO of Mobinoma

The assets of Korea's middle class remain trapped in real estate. Owning a home is perceived as a survival issue beyond mere financial planning. With real estate and stocks being the only practical means to grow wealth, the middle class naturally crowds into the apartment market. This structure has produced several side effects.

First, wealth polarization is accelerating. In Korea, where real estate constitutes most assets, rising property prices directly mean increased wealth, and the gap between those who own assets and those who do not is hard to close. Even the middle class, which could leverage the financial system to buy a home, seems to have had its hope of homeownership pushed further away after the announcement of the 10·15 real estate measures. The unproductive fixation of capital is also a problem. As funds flow only into real estate, they fail to move toward productive areas such as corporate investment, new technology development, and startups.

The generation hit hardest is the youth. Apartment prices have been fixed at levels worth hundreds of millions to billions of won, and interest rate hikes and tougher loan requirements make them unaffordable for young workers and people in their 30s. For young people, real estate has become not an investment target but an 'insurmountable wall.' If capital were diversified into various real-world assets instead of apartments, the concentration on real estate could be eased.

One solution gaining attention is the tokenization of real-world assets (RWA). RWA is a technology that allows real assets such as real estate, bonds, artworks, and commodities to be split into digital tokens on a blockchain for investment. It leads to the 'democratization of investing' by opening investment areas that were previously accessible only to high-net-worth individuals to ordinary investors.

Major countries such as the United States, Europe, and Japan are rapidly incorporating the RWA market into the regulatory framework. U.S. firms BlackRock and JPMorgan have issued government bonds and money market funds (MMFs) in RWA form to increase investor accessibility. In Switzerland and Germany, everything from real estate to artworks and wine is being traded as digital tokens, and in Japan projects tokenizing real estate REITs and corporate bonds are increasing. Global financial firms view RWA as the next-generation asset management platform, and the related market is projected to exceed $1 trillion by 2025.

Korea's RWA market remains in a regulatory blind spot. The Capital Markets Act and the Electronic Securities Act still do not clearly define 'tokenized securities,' and although the Financial Services Commission presented security token (STO) guidelines last year, an environment in which companies can tokenize real assets and issue and trade them has scarcely been established. Law, not technology, is blocking market development.

RWA is not merely a financial technology. It could be a structural channel to set the assets of the middle class and young people in motion again. Without buying an entire apartment, one can invest small amounts in blockchain-based real estate shares, and opportunities open up to assets that were previously hard to access, such as bonds, artworks, and carbon credits. The spread of RWA in Korea seems to be an institutional rather than technological issue. I hope the government promptly establishes clear standards for the tokenization of real-world assets.