On the sidelines of Consensus 2026 in Miami, on May 6th, NOWNodes hosted the tokenization meetup and gathered leaders from Crypto.com, Zerion, Solflare, Li.Fi, the TON Foundation, Paxos, Houdini Swap, and Globalstake. They had an open talk about what it takes to build successful tokenized systems and the impact on those affected when they fail.
The first panel, moderated by ChangeNOW's Chief Strategy Officer Pauline, zeroed in on a deceptively simple question: what does consistency mean in a multi-chain world, and who is responsible when systems disagree?
Philipp Zentner, founder and CEO of Li.Fi — which has processed over $80 billion in transaction volume — challenged the room to confront the industry's double standards. "What are the parameters based on which we decide to trust entities?" "How do you believe that your stablecoins are backed by cash held by a private, unaudited company, and at the same time ask whether a tokenized apartment in Dubai really exists?" he said.
The $300 million hack of the Kelp DAO and LayerZero ecosystem served as a recurring case study. Panelists largely agreed the failure was infrastructural. Solflare co-founder Vidor Gencel noted that his team runs five RPC providers simultaneously, cross-referencing responses for high-priority transactions. "For those high-priority use cases, we cross-reference data correctness across RPC providers — which, in the DAO hack, they didn't."
Abi Dharshan of Zerion offered a broader frame: the meme coin supercycle, chaotic as it was, may have been precisely the stress test the industry needed. "The amount of engineering work invested for data correctness, data redundancy, real-time prices, transaction landing — is insane," he said. "If there weren't a cycle which brought such a big economic impact, it's questionable if people would have been able to value what future incoming institutions require."
Kwon Park, Global Head of Digital Assets at Crypto.com, framed the consistency challenge as fundamentally a cultural one. For a platform of Crypto.com's scale — spanning an exchange, brokerage, credit and debit cards, and prediction markets — there is no minimum standard to aim for. "We don't look at things as, let's aim for this minimum standard. We just have to keep it high quality all the time," he said. That means proactive investment in SOC 2 audits, NIST certifications, business continuity programs, and cold wallet insurance — not as compliance checkboxes, but as the baseline cost of handling customer funds at scale.
The second panel, hosted by Samuel Burke of CCN, took a harder look at real-world asset tokenization — and opened with a deliberately uncomfortable provocation. "I heard all of this in 2021 with NFTs," Burke said, "and by 2023, 95% of NFT collections had a market cap of effectively zero. What's different this time?"
The common thread across all answers was: NFTs were speculative collectibles with no underlying value or yield. RWAs are tied to real assets, real regulation, and real institutional capital — and the regulatory environment under the current U.S. administration has opened doors that were firmly shut in 2021-2023.
Martin Masser, Head of Growth at the TON Foundation, brought two decades of banking experience to bear on the industry's blind spot: the humans inside legacy institutions. "If you're in a bank and you want to do RWAs, it's a big risk to be that first player. If you do really well, you get a tap on the back. If you mess it up — you're out." Most banks, he noted, are still running software from the 1960s.
Gary Chan of Paxos — which has issued over $180 billion in tokenized assets and recently moved from a New York DFS trust to a federal OCC charter — argued that regulatory clarity remains the single biggest unlock. Paxos's experience unwinding over $16 billion in BUSD after a 2023 NYDFS enforcement order, he said, had ultimately demonstrated the resilience of a properly regulated infrastructure, not its fragility.
Ryan Haczynski of Globalstake pointed to a less visible form of RWA liquidity that often gets missed in the data: institutional players using tokenized assets as collateral to access stablecoin loans, then deploying that capital in delta-neutral strategies off-chain. "There are sophisticated things happening in a blend of on and off-chain that the data doesn't necessarily reveal," he said.
The panels closed on a note of cautious optimism, with speakers pointing to the Genius Act and broader legislative momentum as potential catalysts. Elias Enriquez of Houdini Swap argued that the real unlock isn't any single regulation — it's seamless interoperability and on-chain privacy robust enough to bring in users who have never touched a wallet. "Your grandma can get in, she can start buying RWAs, but she's not completely doxing everything she's done in the past."
Whether the infrastructure will be ready when that moment arrives is a question both panels left deliberately open — and one the industry's growing community of builders appears intent on answering before the next cycle forces the issue.