Crypto investment firm RockawayX raises $150 million, betting earnings products will be the next big application scenario

Digital asset investment firm RockawayX revealed to CoinDesk on Thursday that it will invest $150 million in a special program called Catapult, which supports tokenized lending products. The company manages about $2 billion and is betting on the same judgment: on-chain borrowings tied to the real economy are poised to become one of the largest markets for the crypto industry.

What Project Catapult offers

Unlike a fund that simply invests, Catapult is an all-chain support project covering five elements: early venture capital, product structure design, liquidity support, marketing and distribution channels. In other words, a team that wants to move private equity credit up the chain from refining products to finally finding buyers can access resources within the RockawayX system.

The logic behind this practice is that the bottleneck for tokenized credit products often involves more than just funding, but also how to design a compliance structure, how to get enough liquidity in DeFi protocols and how to reach both on-chain and off-chain funders.

Existing layout of RockawayX

RockawayX has accumulated multiple links in the crypto investment chain: a venture capital fund for early stage projects, a market-neutral fund that provides liquidity to DeFi protocols and an already deployed vault business of around $300 million. In August this year, the company also acquired Relayer, a cryptocurrency hedge fund, further expanding its trading and liquidity capabilities.

This means that instead of starting from scratch, Catapult will integrate existing venture capital, liquidity and market making resources to focus on the sub-race of tokenized credit.

How big is the market for tokenized assets

According to RWA.xyz, tokenized real-world assets such as bonds, stocks and funds currently total about $38 billion, of which more than half are tokenised money market funds with a small share still held by private creditors, which is where RockawayX sees growth.

Looking ahead to the market outlook, RockawayX sees a $10-20 trillion monetized asset market in the 2030s. This judgment is significantly more aggressive than Citigroup analysts' benchmark scenario that forecasts $5.5 trillion by the end of this decade.

What it means for the industry

If Catapult lands successfully, its impact could be seen in two ways: providing a brick-and-mortar infrastructure gateway to the chain for private credit institutions and lowering the thresholds of tokenization; and introducing traditional credit assets into DeFi, which would provide an income stream that is less correlated with crypto market fluctuations.