Palmer is a generational founder…

current RWA tokenization narratives tier list

Exactly. AMMs assume fungible, unrestricted liquidity. The moment you add transfer restrictions, the whole composability model breaks. The unlock is an interface layer where compliance is a primitive, not a patch. Wrote about what that looks like:

The token was never the unlock. The interface is. Treasuries worked because the process was already standardized. HELOCs worked for the same reason. DeFi proved the vault pattern scales. Private markets haven't moved because nobody's built the common rails to move them. That's

And here's the number I can't stop thinking about. $308 billion in stablecoins sitting on-chain right now. DAO treasuries. Protocol reserves. Liquidity pools. Capital that already lives on-chain and has no intention of leaving. Compare that to $19 billion in tokenized

Now look at what's happening on the other side. @RobinhoodApp is tokenizing stocks. Not just public equities, but private company shares too. Wrapped for 24/7 trading. A retail investor can trade SpaceX exposure at 2am on a Sunday. Meanwhile, a GP trying to transfer an LP stake

But DeFi vaults are permissionless by design. They work for liquid, anonymous strategies. Private markets can't be permissionless. A venture fund can't accept capital from anonymous wallets. A real estate fund can't transfer ownership to unaccredited investors. Those constraints

And DeFi already proved this works in crypto. Between 2020 and 2025, vaults became the dominant pattern. A pooled investment wrapper with the same interface for every strategy. Deposit. Withdraw. Share accounting. Same actions, everywhere. It scaled to billions in TVL. The

This pattern isn't new. It's been solved before. 1968. Wall Street hit a paperwork crisis so severe they had to close markets on Wednesdays just to catch up. The system was breaking under its own weight. @The_DTCC centralized settlement in 1973. Same actions. Same sequence.

Here's what clicked for me. @BlackRock and @Figure didn't succeed because they had better tokens. They succeeded because the underlying process was already standardized before the token touched it. Private markets are the opposite. Every fund is a snowflake. Terms are bespoke.

Then there's @Figure. They put over $10 billion in home equity lines of credit on-chain. Not a promise. Not a roadmap. Done. HELOCs work because underwriting is standardized - credit score, debt-to-income, loan-to-value. Cash flows are predictable. Servicing is automated.

@BlackRock launched BUIDL in early 2024. By 2025, it crossed $2 billion in tokenized treasuries. That's not a pilot. That's one of the largest asset managers in the world going all-in on a single product. Why treasuries? Because they move the same way everywhere. Uniform terms.

So I stopped asking why tokenization hasn't worked for private markets. I started asking which assets actually did move on-chain and why. Two stood out. And they weren't what I expected.

Here's a fact that reframed everything for me. The profit-sharing structure behind modern venture capital - the GP/LP split - traces back to 1156 Genoa. A merchant financing Mediterranean voyages. 75% to capital, 25% to the operator. That organizational technology was updated

$19 billion. That's it. And almost half of that is just treasuries. RWAs like private equity, venture capital, real estate. The asset classes that were supposed to be transformed by tokenization barely register. If tokenization is the unlock, why does the present look like a

Tokenization isn't the breakthrough everyone thinks it is. @BCG says $16T. @McKinsey says $2-4T. @Citibank says $5T by 2030. I wanted to believe it. I still do. I've built products around that belief. But look at what's actually on-chain today 🧵