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In the world · Finance · 29 June 2025

Tokenizing real-world assets: BUIDL, BIS and McKinsey

BlackRock's tokenized BUIDL fund, the BIS report and McKinsey's projection show real-world asset tokenization entering the financial system.

bairogonzalez.com team, drawing on Bairo's story · Published

Real-world asset tokenization, known by the acronym RWA, is the digital representation, on a shared ledger, of an asset that exists outside the network, such as a government bond, a property or a receivable. Between 2024 and 2025, it stopped being an experiment: BlackRock launched the tokenized BUIDL fund, the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) pointed to tokenization as the basis of the next monetary system, and McKinsey projected a market of about US$ 2 trillion in tokenized financial assets by 2030, in its base case.

What happened

On March 20, 2024, BlackRock announced the BlackRock USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund, BUIDL, issued on the Ethereum network, with Securitize responsible for tokenization. The fund invests in cash, U.S. Treasury bills and repurchase agreements, and is restricted to qualified investors. In March 2025, according to Markets Media, it passed US$ 1 billion in assets and was already circulating on several networks, such as Ethereum, Aptos, Arbitrum, Avalanche, Optimism and Polygon, with BNY Mellon as custodian.

In June 2024, McKinsey published the study "From ripples to waves," which estimates the value of tokenized financial assets at about US$ 2 trillion by 2030 in the base case, excluding crypto assets and stablecoins, and double that in an optimistic scenario. The same study was frank about the difficulties: broad adoption is still far off, and the market faces a "cold start" problem, in which liquidity is lacking because users are lacking, and users are lacking because liquidity is lacking.

On June 29, 2025, the BIS published chapter III of its Annual Economic Report, devoted to the next monetary and financial system. Its thesis is that tokenization on a unified ledger, bringing together central bank reserves, bank deposits and securities, can integrate messaging, reconciliation and settlement in a single operation. The same report was harsh on stablecoins, which, according to the BIS, fail the tests of singleness, elasticity and integrity of money.

Why it matters

Today, a real asset passes through several different ledgers: the issuer's, the custodian's, the exchange's, the bank's. Each handoff costs time and opens room for error. Tokenization proposes that recording and transfer happen in the same place, at any hour, with programmed rules.

For agribusiness, the idea has direct appeal. A future harvest, stored inventory or a sales receivable could, in theory, be represented digitally and serve as the basis for credit, without the grower having to pledge their land or home as collateral. Tokenization does not create value out of nothing: it only works when there is a real asset, a reliable record and a legal structure behind it.

The data also call for prudence. The BIS and McKinsey themselves say the road is long, and in Brazil the offering of tokenized assets to the public follows the rules of the CVM (Brazil's securities regulator) and the Central Bank.

In Bairo's view

Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez says that, when he began building CEASA Bank, he heard from banks that they would not integrate a solution based on ISO 20022 messaging, blockchain and real-world asset tokenization. In his reading, BlackRock's move and the BIS report show that the direction was right, even if the road is still long.

For Bairo, the most important real asset in Brazilian agribusiness is not on the balance sheet of a large fund. It is in the sale made at five in the morning at a wholesale supply center, which, recorded and verifiable, can become the history that opens credit to those who never had it. The infrastructure that connects agribusiness to the world, in his view, is the one that makes it possible to prove what truly exists.

He also measures by lifetime. An asset that can be verified in minutes saves weeks of paperwork. For Bairo, it is this time given back that gives technology its meaning.

Where this meets the ecosystem

The design of CEASA Bank, an agribusiness financial platform that operates on the infrastructure of an authorized institution, includes the proposal that growers raise funds based on the digital representation of production-linked assets, with its own legal structure and an authorized institution in each operation. It is a proposal being implemented, not a finished product.

The BTZ Chain is the ecosystem's public record network, which anyone can check in the explorer. BICOIN, this network's governance coin, follows the yardstick "1 BTZ = 1 minute of human life", which is purpose, with no price and no invitation to buy.

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