BlackRock, Goldman Back Tokenized Real-World Assets, Opening Treasuries and Office Towers to Retail Investors

Korea Investment Week

Hong Eun-pyo, Lawyer at Lee & Ko

“Putting real-world assets, or RWAs, on-chain is more than a technical experiment. It is a financial infrastructure revolution that will reshape capital markets.”

Hong Eun-pyo, a lawyer at Lee & Ko and chairman of the Korean Society of Blockchain Law, made the remarks at Korea Investment Week 2026, held on May 14 at the Shilla Hotel in Seoul’s Jangchung-dong. He said the trust infrastructure for digital assets will determine the future of finance.

Hong identified “on-chainization” as a key concept for investors to watch. The term refers to the process of recording real-world assets on blockchain networks and tokenizing them. Ownership and transaction records are stored transparently on distributed ledgers, allowing large buildings or bonds that were once difficult to divide and sell to be split into smaller stakes and traded in real time around the clock from anywhere in the world.

From an investment standpoint, growth in the RWA market has been overwhelming. Hong said the market for RWAs recorded on blockchains has surged to $50 billion from about $5 billion just two years ago. He said there is a clear reason global financial giants such as BlackRock and Goldman Sachs are racing to issue tokenized US Treasuries: blockchain infrastructure carries almost no intermediary costs, allowing them to maximize capital efficiency. For individual investors, that opens the door to diversified investments in US Treasuries or prime office buildings with small amounts of money.

Countries are also locked in a fierce race to take the lead in global regulation. The US has increased institutional clarity by classifying Bitcoin as a commodity and placing tokenized securities under the jurisdiction of the Securities and Exchange Commission. Germany has also moved quickly to gain an early advantage by adopting a single-ledger system through its Electronic Securities Act that recognizes legal ownership directly on blockchain-based registries.

Park Ju-yeon, Korea Economic Daily reporter grumpy_cat@hankyung.com