Chasing Liquidity: HK's Practitioners Charting Tokenised Alts

"I want cash," said Keanu Wong, 26, founder of Ronclos Gallery, who operates across art, hospitality, and brand collaboration projects in New York, Hong Kong, and Budapest.

Wong is actively exploring blockchain technology to transform his art collections, brand partnerships, and commercial contracts into liquid capital.

Keanu Wong, 26, a Gen-Z collector, moved to Macau at the beginning of 2026 and launched a new art space in Saigon.

Wong owns a portfolio of blue-chip artworks, museum-quality masterpieces, including works by Picasso, Kusama, Giacometti, and Salvador Dalí. His personal art holdings are valued at approximately US$3.5 million, while the total assets under his management — including those of clients — range between US$75 million and US$82 million.

“Our partnership contracts with Don Negulio, with Carlton, or LVMH, we're trying to tokenise those contracts into a bond for different investors to be traded on different crypto platforms,” said Wong.

As personal passion for collecting evolved into a strong need for liquidity, Wong identified a significant price arbitrage opportunity: art prices in Europe and the United States are substantially lower than in Hong Kong.

By relocating high-quality pieces to the Asian market, he has experienced up to 400% appreciation in value. To capitalise on this opportunity, Wong plans to acquire another 30 Picasso works on the international market within the next three months.

Without extremely fast cash recycling, this deal simply cannot work, he added.

At the core of his strategy is tokenisation, primarily to unlock collateralised loans. By converting physical artworks into Real World Assets (RWA) on the blockchain, Wong aims to borrow against them without selling the pieces outright.

/ 01

Part One

The Gate-Knockers

In Hong Kong, a growing number of holders of alternative assets are confronting the same pressing question: how to convert “valuable but illiquid” holdings into immediate cash.

Such intense pursuit of liquidity is not limited to young entrepreneurs. Viann Lo, a Hong Kong-based art professional with nearly a decade of experience in the traditional market, is now helping clients tokenise mid-tier artworks.

“Rent for a space in Central is HK$150,000–160,000 per month,” Lo recalled from her days running a gallery on Annan Street, Central.

After the pandemic severely impacted the art market, she closed her physical gallery and repositioned herself as a high-level connector between collectors, celebrities, and capital.

Viann Lo, Chief Executive Officer of Lindalu Hong Kong Art Space, started to seek opportunities to tokenise artworks in December 2025

One of her key current projects is assisting renowned actor Simon Yam (Ren Dahua) in bringing his art creations onto the blockchain.

Unlike Wong's blue-chip Picassos with clear market valuations, Yam's works are described by Lo as “very early-stage”, lacking established “blue-chip status” or strong market credentials.

As those artworks cannot be verified by galleries and auctions, Lo sees both potential and risk in RWA solutions.

“Once I bring these paintings to you, can you help me generate cash flow?” she says, voicing the blunt questions from collectors – Who compensates if the artwork is lost? What if the owner refuses to release the physical piece?

As a practitioner and solution seeker with a little related background, she hopes RWA can evolve beyond hype into a credible, bank-like financial system that provides genuine liquidity pathways for early-stage and abstract art.

For Wong, such financialisation desire goes even further.

Beyond the paintings on his walls, he is seeking to tokenise intangible assets — notably long-term brand partnership contracts.

Ronclos Gallery holds multi-year agreements with luxury giants such as The Ritz-Carlton, LVMH, and Don Julio — which are considered “dead assets” in conventional finance — they guarantee steady profit shares over the next two to three years but cannot be used directly to fund immediate purchases, such as the upcoming Picasso acquisitions.

“The hardest part of alternative assets is appraisal,” Wong pointed out.

His solution is to bondify these contracts — packaging future revenue streams into digital bonds on the blockchain that investors can trade on crypto platforms, thereby generating instant cash.

To Wong, blockchain serves as a critical “language bridge” between real-world assets and global financial markets. It converts the creditworthiness of LVMH and other luxury brands into immediate liquidity, giving Wong a competitive edge in the race to secure major artworks.

Wong and Lo aren't outliers.

In Hong Kong, policymakers, traditional finance (TradFi) professionals and asset investors are all grappling with a bigger question: in a world of high barriers and low-liquidity alternative assets, can putting assets on-chain truly turn “value” into “liquidity”?

Tokenisation, the process of converting ownership rights into blockchain tokens, is recognised as a definitive solution for asset mobilisation.

The global tokenised asset market hit over US$30 billion, up nearly 10 folds from three years prior, according to InvestaX, while BCG projects a bold US$16-18 trillion by early 2030s.

Unlike 2020’s speculative Non-Fungible Token (NFT) boom, the core of tokenised Real World Asset (RWA) is about turning real estate, PE, bonds, and contracts into programmable, fractional, 24/7-tradable tokens.

“NFTs and RWA differ fundamentally. NFTs symbolise digital ownership without real backing, while RWA requires something real—art, property, or gold,” said Melizza Anievas, OSL’s social media manager and new media producer, at a “Women in Web3” event on Feb 3.

Though leveraged NFT tech for proof-of-ownership, RWA’s value anchors to real-world goods and cash flows, which is drawing Wall Street giants.

BlackRock launched its first public blockchain tokenised fund, BUIDL, Exceeding US$2.9 billion by mid-2025, it becomes the world’s largest tokenised Treasury fund, spurring TradFi adoption and proving institutional-grade capital has embraced the efficiency and security of on-chain settlement.

Hong Kong aligns globally with regulatory evolution. In June 2025, the government released its "Policy Statement 2.0," introduced “LEAP”—streamlining laws and expanding tokenised products—to cement its digital asset hub status.

Meanwhile, the Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) launched Project Ensemble, providing financial-grade settlement infrastructure for tokenised assets via a sandbox.

On April 10, HKMA granted stablecoin issuer licenses under the Stablecoins Ordinance to Anchorpoint Financial and HSBC, marking the first institutions in the city to be licensed since the ordinance formally took effect on August 1, 2025.

With clearer frameworks, 2026 saw more local breakthroughs: February’s DL Tower tokenisation by DL Holdings became Hong Kong’s first compliant commercial real estate RWA benchmark; March brought Timeless Resources’ SFC-licensed tokenised silver. More professional investors now access high-bar PE in unicorns like Xiaohongshu, ByteDance, and SpaceX via tokenised shares.

As the RWA hot emerge, Hong Kong pioneers are thawing frozen alternative assets via blockchain technology, linking them to cash-hungry private investors' portfolios.

/ 02

Part Two

The Path-Builder

Art, as an Asset Class — Hong Kong start-up taps blockchain tech to liquidise blue-chip arts for old moneys

When 3D still means three-dimensional to you and me, a quiet wave of founders has been turning fine art into divisible, on-chain capital.

Death, divorce and debt –That’s probably what happened to old-money collectors when they decided to cash out their 'babies' in an auction — credit to Grace Lau, given 13 years of expertise in fine art investment.

Departing from Hong Kong Cyberport in 2022, her fintech company, Artwise, focuses on those “babies” held in private hands, offering new financing opportunities for market-resilient masterwork holders by integrating blockchain technology.

RWA is an easier and faster way to let more people be involved in Art purchase, said Grace Lau, founder of Artwise, during a panel discussion on Global Web3 Dev Con, a side event around Consensus week on Feb 8, 2026.

As said, "The cream of the crop is rarely left on the shelf."

Lau’s start-up targets only blue-chip art, a high-heritage asset that could maintain a steady, gradual upward trend for at least 20 years, to hedge against market downturns caused by political and economic chaos.

“Starting from 2022, there are many old money families in Europe—the sort that have been extremely wealthy for generations— that began quietly approaching dealers on the private market,” said Lau, who happened to discover the subtle change during the pandemic.

Viann Lo, the Chief Executive Officer of Lindalu Hong Kong Art Space, shared that traditional channels such as galleries and auction houses charge a 25% commission on sales, drawing on her years of experience in art management.

Since the pandemic in 2020, transaction volumes have grown more than values, as the expansion of online sales gives more transactions – mostly at lower prices, leaving a declining liquidity to high-end pieces, according to The Art Basel and UBS Art Market Report 2026, a study of the performance of key market segments against the backdrop of buyer behaviour and geopolitical and economic conditions.

“They (old money families in Europe) have been dropping hints to sell their collections to museums, institutions, or Asian collectors, as they seem to believe, for some reason, that Asia is where the money is,” she said.

Echoing Lau, data from the Art Basel and UBS Art Market Report 2021 show that Private sales by auction houses rose 36% to over $3.2 billion in 2020, while public auctions fell 30% to $17.6 billion—the only auction segment with positive growth.

In 2022, private sales reached $1 billion at Phillips (48% above 2020 pandemic levels) and $1.3 billion at Christie's (double 2020's share at 30% of total revenue)—indicating sustained strength amid geopolitical tensions and inflation.

Besides, Asian countries and regions account for 6 of the top 14 in terms of art allocation from overall wealth, with Mainland China taking the crown at 27%, after Japan at 18%, in a 2025 study by Arts Economics and UBS, involving over 3,660 HNWIs.

“At the time, I felt this was a brilliant opportunity,” said Lau. “It's not taking advantage of the situation, but rather we were genuinely capable of working hard to meet the need that had arisen.”

By capitalising on Hong Kong’s status as an East-and-West gateway, the post-pandemic shift in market sentiment, and Lau’s extensive industry network, Artwise is set to pioneer art-backed lending and fractional ownership of masterpieces—transforming artwork into liquid assets.

Business model and comparative advantage

Phase I: The "Flash Liquidity" Advantage

The first pillar for Artwise is the launch of its collateralised-art lending platform, slated for Q2 2026.

Compared to traditional private sales, Immediacy is the company’s competitive edge, Lau mentioned.

“What I mean is that once you’ve tokenised your assets today, you’ll be able to borrow as much as you want tomorrow or tonight—not three months spent hunting for investors,” said Lau with confidence.

Artwise achieves this by pre-integrating fiat currency from traditional financing with on-chain capital. This synergy creates a dedicated stablecoin lending pool with USDT or USDC “liquidity pool” - as they call it, allowing collectors to convert their assets almost instantly.

For a blue-chip masterpiece, Artwise handles the entire offline heavy lifting: legal structuring, forensic due diligence, and valuation certification. Once cleared, the artwork will be tokenised to generate a bespoke asset token, e.g., "Masterpiece No. 1 Token".

Crucially, the token’s value is pegged to the masterpiece’s maximum loanable amount and remains independent of the Artwise platform, Lau added.

While collectors can manage these tokens in their own digital wallets, “The clients we are engaging are more traditional, and they prefer us to act as proxies, managing (the entire process) on their behalf,” she mentioned.

Through an Artwise account, collectors can monitor real-time valuations and loan out their "Masterpiece No. 1 Token" at will.

While the system provides AI-driven advice, users retain the autonomy to set their own terms—for instance, a short-term three-month liquidity bridge, Lau said.

Borrowing the same infrastructure from the Uniswap model, these bespoke art tokens can be directly swapped for stablecoins within the liquidity pool.

However, Artwise’s most significant advantage lies in its Loan-to-Value (LTV) ratio, which consistently outperforms that of private banks.

“Think of it like a $10 million property,” Lau explains. “A bank, fearing a default, might lend you $7 million, keeping a 30% buffer to hedge risk. ”

Yet in the Art lending circle, traditional private banks are notoriously conservative with fine art, often capping LTVs at a measly 30%. To them, art is a niche asset class that doesn't justify the manpower required for precise risk assessment, Lau explains.

In contrast, powered by deep domain-specific market data and an understanding of price volatility, Artwise could safely push the LTV to 50%, almost doubling asset-liquidation efficiency, she added.

“We have the industry know-how; they don’t,” Lau says with a confident shrug.

Besides, the company’s comparative advantage is further bolstered by its valuation methodology.

Partnering with a New York-based valuation firm, Artwise utilises a hybrid AI-human model to price blue-chip works. While Lau keeps the partner’s name confidential, she reveals that the firm’s credibility helped Artwise secure its Series A funding in 2025.

The insurance could cover the gap between the valuation amount and the real market value if the borrower defaults and the artwork enters liquidation.

Phase II: From Art to Capital

Apart from the first pillar that will launch very soon, the second pillar introduces fractional ownership, allowing both institutions and professional investors to buy into blue-chip shares for capital appreciation.

Lau mentioned she is currently in talks with boutique wealth management firms in Hong Kong and Singapore

“From day one, we have focused exclusively on B-class business, catering solely to institutional investors and private credit,” she said, giving the current regulatory environment to Private Investors and family Offices.

For Lau, compared with a more secure and common business model, fractionalization for the masses is a "nice-to-have" bonus; the lending model is the "must-have" necessity.

“You won’t starve if you can't buy 1% of a Picasso,” Lau added.

“What about an old-money family with a $10 million painting and a broken cash flow? They need a loan to survive. ”

Despite her embrace of RWA, Lau remains grounded in one truth: the real capital still resides in traditional vaults.

"There is zero liquidity in the art world," she says.

“I’m working tirelessly to get the private equity firms and private banks on board. That’s where the real money is.”

Potential Risks and Difficulties

Although traditional banks have ramped up discussions around RWA and tokenisation, their actual asset allocation remains extremely cautious.

Art-related RWA is a sector marked by both rich narratives and significant practical challenges. DL Digital Finance (DLDF)—a digital finance and tokenisation platform provider under DL Holdings, a Hong Kong-listed wealth management and private banking group—said it currently has no plans to participate in this space, in an exclusive written reply.

At present, DLDF is focusing on RWA opportunities with higher compliance standards, clearly defined underlying rights, and suitability for professional investors. These include the completed DL Tower RWA project, private equity investments involving Animoca Brands—one of the participants in Hong Kong’s first batch of stablecoin licensing initiatives—and CMAE Cayman fund products issued and managed by DL itself.

Major institutions such as HSBC and Standard Chartered have actively pushed forward projects — including ,Libeara’s money market funds, Project Guardian’s ABS tokenisation, and HSBC’s Gold Token and tokenised deposits.

Yet all these initiatives remain confined to high-liquidity assets such as sovereign bonds, trade finance, gold, and private credit, with rare fine art or blue-chip artworks involved.

Several past failures in fractional art (NFT) and tokenisation are widely believed to be a key reason for institutional investors’ continued reluctance.

Echoing the above cases, start-up的失敗率是90%, Fintech & blockchain startups have slightly higher failure rates due to regulatory and adoption challenges； Art-related startups (fractional ownership, tokenisation, NFTs) face additional hurdles like market volatility and niche audiences, as Kimfatt Lim, Founder & Chairman of EnrichMeta Art Group. Chairman of Nelumbo Art Gallery. Chairman of CulturalVerse International Ltd. shared in his LinkedIn post.

Reflecting on the development of NFTs and art tokenisation, Grace Lau and DL DF share the view that the industry urgently needs sustainable business models rather than hype-driven pump-and-dump projects.

“Over the past few years, RWA has indeed exhibited a phase where narratives moved ahead of actual implementation,” DL Holdings added.

“The issue is not a lack of market interest, but rather that many projects have focused on storytelling instead of addressing the practical processes required for execution and building a fully integrated lifecycle.”

“Many so-called art-blockchain companies were never genuinely interested in building real solutions,” Lau recalled. She noted that some web3 projects, in their rush for attention, have seriously damaged the industry’s reputation.

As DL noted in its written reply, breaking this cycle does not require flashy cases, but solid ones.

What truly advances the sector are typically not the most complex art narratives or early-stage equity tokenisation experiments, but projects with a high degree of standardisation, robust corporate governance, clearly defined underlying rights, transparent valuation, well-defined custody arrangements, and suitability for professional investors—alongside the ability to consistently complete the full cycle of issuance, reconciliation, income distribution, redemption, and auditing.

Today, beyond managing liquidity pools, Lau’s greatest challenge lies in closely tracking the evolving regulatory landscape and continuously adjusting operational details in real time.

“What we worry about most is making sure we never step over any legal red lines,” she said.

Hong Kong and the World; Present and Future

Looking back on her entrepreneurial history, Lau first came across her startup concept through art networking communities. It was only after 2024 that she began to form the initial idea for what would eventually become ArtWise.

“At that time, I was obsessively researching blockchain,” she recalled. “Regulation was still very vague, and everyone was learning from scratch.”

In the early days of the project, staff from Cyberport and government departments would even consult her for professional advice, she added.

With more than 20 years of art education and industry experience across Beijing, New York, London, and Seoul, Lau estimates that Hong Kong lags roughly 10 years behind Western markets in terms of industry maturity and awareness.

“In the West — especially the United States — art is already treated as a legitimate asset class for allocation and investment,” she said. “In Asia, the market is still in the education phase.”

Grace Lau noted that when dealing with investors from the US and Switzerland, she can go straight to the product and its function without background explanation. In Asia, she often needs to start from the very basics.

Nevertheless, when it comes to positioning Hong Kong as a global hub for cultural asset RWA, Lau gives it a perfect 10/10.

“Hong Kong’s hardware infrastructure for the art industry is outstanding,” she explained. “It has zero tax on art transactions, hosts all the major international auction houses, and boasts complete logistics, insurance, and supporting services — advantages that are hard to find elsewhere in Asia.”

Lau is highly confident about the future as the regulatory environment becomes more standardised and clearer, government support strengthens, and traditional financial institutions increasingly participate.

She believes art RWA will eventually become a standard alternative asset in the portfolios of family offices and asset management firms.

“That is exactly why we are pushing so hard to enter this market,” she said.

/ 03

Part Three

The Front-Runners

This round aimed SpaceX: Certified fintech firms bridge private investors to high-entry cost assets.

Elon Musk, venture capitalists, and day-one stakeholders are no longer the only beneficiaries who will go over the moon from SpaceX, the rocket-making unicorn, getting listed in the near future.

As blockchain technology evolves, however, professional investors with only $1 million can also share in the euphoric moment of this $2 trillion Initial Public Offering (IPO) project.

That is the pitch from Manton Wai, head of investment solutions at Evident, a Hong Kong-based digital securities platform that uses licensed infrastructure for alternative assets.

For him, the real opportunity is not in tokenising the technology itself, but in opening up assets that were previously exclusively open to the largest funds and earliest backers.

Wai states the business necessity in three points: first, they crack down on the blocker; second, there is real visibility into ownership and transferability on a public ledger.

As of April 16, there are 25 private equity projects listed on the firm's website, including TikTok maker ByteDance; Chinese social media giant Xiaohongshu; and US defence technology company Anduril.

"We don't drive the market. It's the market telling us, you've got to do this."

Manton Wai, head of investment solutions at Evident.

Hong Kong launched the world's first tokenised green bond in 2023, showing the city's ambition to turn tokenisation from a buzzword into a policy-backed market.

In August, 2024, the Hong Kong Monetary Authority pushed ahead with Project Ensemble, a sandbox to test how tokenised assets could be issued, settled and transferred within a regulated financial system.

In 2025, the number of stakeholders involved expanded to include seven commercial banks and 13 industry participants, enabling them to settle tokenised transactions “faster, more transparently and efficiently”, HKMA said.

Hong Kong is turning tokenisation from a policy experiment into a piece of financial infrastructure that can move within an established compliance framework.

As traditional financial institutions deepen their presence in the web3 market, Hong Kong firms are using tokenisation to push beyond private equity and art into assets such as silver and gold, turning once-illiquid holdings into cheaper, more accessible tradable products.

After spending more than 8 years on the first SFC license for LNG carriers in 2023, the firm now has more than 40 assets across infrastructure, art, hedge funds, and private equity.

In practice, Evident’s tokenisation process begins off-chain. The firm first conducts due diligence on the underlying asset, then structures it through a special purpose vehicle (SPV) before issuing tokens that represent interests in that vehicle, rather than direct ownership of the asset itself.

In other words, the blockchain layer does not create a new SpaceX stake out of thin air; it wraps an existing private-market exposure in a regulated legal structure and gives it a digital form that can be tracked, transferred and distributed more efficiently.

Private Investor through Evident is not holding shares of the Unicorn company, but rather a 'digital certificate' representing an SPV that holds shares in SpaceX

Looking back at Evident’s business model, Wai said the technology is the easy part; the real challenge is distribution, which depends on whether regulators accept the structure, whether banks and wealth managers understand it, and whether investors trust it enough to put money in.

To solve that, Evident has leaned on licensed partners such as HKVAX and positioned itself as a bridge between asset managers, private wealth investors and regulated distribution channels, rather than a standalone platform that simply mints tokens.

Defined the firm’s product as digital assets rather than virtual assets, Wai shared that Evident also follows regulations under the SFC, the same as other traditional financial institutions, making it much easier to communicate with legal, with their compliance, and with their risk team

“We speak the same language with any kind of existing license player in this market. The legal, their compliance, their risk team,” said Wai, “Every traditional security law will be applied to us”.

Besides, with the legal and licensing framework in place, the asset will still be found even if the digital representation is lost, reducing the risk of accidental errors compared with virtual assets.

Compared with a company with virtual assets, Wai mentioned the investor came because of the underlying asset, “it's attractive, solid, and they appreciate the underlying performance,” said Wai.

Stating the company as “market infrastructure” rather than a crypto platform or “RWA investment bank”, Wai reflected that the driving action is always because of the underlying assets.

Echoing Wai’s insights with its own action, another listed company company brought silver on-chain, broadening Hong Kong’s practice of turning a bulky physical asset into a tradable financial product in March.

“I think for institutional investors, we see many more institutions with silver in their portfolios to hedge against currency or geopolitical risks,” said Ronald Tan, Chief Executive Officer of Timeless Resources, when mentioning the market opportunities and investment preference switch brought by geopolitical tension.

Timeless Resources (“Timeless Resources”) a listed mining and metal trading company, launched what it called Hong Kong’s first regulated silver-backed RWA token, with each token representing one troy ounce of 0.9999 fine physical silver stored in secure, insured vaults operated by an independent third party.

The tokens were launched by Silver Times, a subsidiary of Timeless Resources, with HashKey, a digital asset trading giant, providing technical and infrastructure support.

“The successful launch of our project will be a great role model for a lot of asset holders,” said Tan in February before the product launch.

Tan was giving a talk on 10 February, one of the side events around the Consensus 2026.

Started the tokenisation project last year, Tan and his company identified pain points in the current silver trading market: management fees on small positions can climb to 3% to 4% of the value, dragging down the ROI for silver investment.

Reflecting on the recent volatility that saw silver prices touch the $100 mark before retreating, Tan views the market’s turbulence as a "healthy reset."

While many investors hesitated at the peak, Tan notes that the late-January 2026 correction served to wash out excessive short positions, allowing the market to consolidate around a new reality.

“We get used to silver prices at maybe $30 or $40, but when it breaks $100, investors naturally wonder if a breakthrough or a correction is next,” Tan added. For him, the stabilisation around $60 to $70 is not a sign of weakness, but the establishment of a "new floor price" for the metal.

With zero storage costs or holding fees, 24/7 transferability, and capital liquidity, the company reached 83% of its original 40,000-token placement goal, with 33,227.875 tokens issued at HK$525 per token, according to the March 27 announcement.

The current focus on Hong Kong’s individual professional investors with portfolios of at least HK$8 million is a strategic choice that fits the city’s tight regulatory framework.

Many tokenised private funds and RWA projects (e.g. gold, private equity, real estate) are classified as Complex Products and are offered only to professional investors. Furthermore, the SFC states that non-SFC-authorised collective investment schemes — a category that covers many RWA token offerings — may generally only be sold to professional investors under the Securities and Futures Ordinance

For “asset porting” firms like Evidence and Timeless Resources, however, the PI market is only the first mile of a longer journey toward what Wai calls “the liberalisation of alternatives.”

Wai, though, remains cautious about opening the door to retail investors. “If you look into global retail products, whether in the UK, the US, or even Singapore, if you take into account the real general retail market, it’s hypersensitive,” he said, adding that retail approvals should go through SFC Product Authorisation, which will take 9 to 12 months and go through multiple stages.

“By tokenising it, we actually demonstrate what kind of structure will be easier to get through, what we combine with the current regulator regime,” Wai said.

Tan, meanwhile, said he would keep watching regulatory regimes and regulators’ thinking, as the market awaits possible relaxation and new policy moves that could open up secondary or third-market trading in tokenised assets.

“I think the market will make the right decision,” he said.

/ 04

Part Four

The Observers

Hong Kong industry educator mapping reality gap through lectures and practice.

Mentoring over 100 RWA industry practitioners, Thomas Ng, an RWA instructor at HKU Space with more than 10 years of fund management experience, observes that students and professionals attending his sessions are not driven by idle curiosity but by a pressing professional necessity.

Even so, Ng still identified the ironic gap when encouraging his student to invest in the RWA product. “Even though they come here (with business growth needs), I found that none of them has actually purchased an RWA when I ask,” Ng says. “They are still hesitant to take the first leap.”

Thomas Ng, executive director and responsible officer of Wealth Management Cube Ltd, a fund investment, dealing& settlement services provider, is delivering a lecture on the RWA regime in the HKU Space classroom in Causeway Bay on Mar 23, with 8 industry students from different ethnicities in attendance.

Talking about the necessity of RWA, Ng makes the case from a practitioner's perspective, citing his experience with short options. In a live market, rather than being static, capital must be ready to be deployed or shifted at a moment's notice to cover positions, he said, adding that the trump card is liquidity.

RWA is the ultimate hedge against time: "I can access my capital every second; it enhances the liquidity of the entire portfolio," he said.

The value of such a tool is rarely felt when the market is calm and steady, Ng added, so more investors see its value during today’s turbulent moments.

When Trump's presidential orders always cause volatility in the financial market, the ability to liquidate assets quickly to meet margin calls becomes a matter of survival.

“It's not something everyone needs to buy; perhaps only one in 10,000 people in the world will truly require it,” Ng said, though noticing the vital utility, he admitted that it remains a niche requirement.

Family office, while, shared the same hesitation as Ng’s students.

“We wouldn't invest in RWA,” said Jasmine Yin, portfolio manager of a local single-family office, stating that they have enough money to invest directly in the traditional finance market.

In her view, the additional management fees and transaction costs that RWA platforms layer onto underlying assets ultimately erode the efficiency traditionally associated with ‘old money.’

Reflecting on Evident's program about on-chain SpaceX and Xiaohongshu stocks, Yin said ‘It’s precisely because you can’t afford direct access that you end up paying an extra layer of fees.”

At its core, this is a repackaging of legacy finance—splitting up pre-IPO stakes and reselling them, wrapping up in a Web3 narrative, she added. If investors are still expected to pay steep interest on top of that, it starts to sound more like a trap, she added.

Drawing from his extensive background in fund management and wealth management, Ng observes that many current RWA projects operate as "brand storytelling,"- building trust and distribution channels first, retroactively filling in the legal costs and on-chain frameworks afterwards as the market matures.

Unlike many Web3 firms in the market, DL Holdings has adopted a more grounded, conservative approach in response to family offices' cautious stance.

Addressing concerns raised by family office managers over “transparency” and “value,” the asset management group has established a set of stringent red-line criteria. “We would rather slow down than compromise on compliance risks,” DL Holdings replied.

In evaluating RWA projects, DL Holdings prioritises whether underlying rights are real, clearly defined, and enforceable.

DL Holdings does not view RWA as a standalone “hot sector,” but rather within a broader digital finance framework—one that focuses on how assets, under compliant structures, achieve rights mapping, custody, distribution, and clearing and settlement, the firm said in a written reply.

“Internally, we do not typically start from on-chain technology. Instead, we begin with the legal relationship of the underlying off-chain assets—specifically: whether the asset genuinely exists; what exact rights are being mapped to investors; and whether those rights can be effectively enforced in the event of default, disputes, or redemption needs,” the firm noted.

“If governance, valuation, exit mechanisms, and compliance boundaries at the underlying level are not fully established, putting assets on-chain will only amplify the problems rather than solve them,” DL Holdings added.

The firm believes that if the market can demonstrate a series of cases that successfully complete the full cycle of “issuance–holding–distribution–redemption–compliant disclosure,” RWA can gradually evolve from proof of concept to institutional adoption.

DL Holdings also stated it is willing to participate in projects that can build long-term trust.

In February 2026, a project by DL Securities (Hong Kong) Limited—DL Tower, a landmark commercial building in Central—received approval from the Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission (SFC), becoming the city’s first tokenised commercial real estate project.

“It is now that the real use case of RWA is finally emerging,” said Daniel Chun, a lecturer at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) and co-founder and chairman of Articulator, a fintech startup, backed by one of his theoretical frameworks to support this confidence in RWA’s long-term trajectory.

Chun introduced the Ghana Hyper Cycle, a graphical presentation that represents the maturity, adoption, and social application of specific technologies, and argued that blockchain-driven markets usually climb quickly on optimism, then fall when expectations outrun actual use cases, according to his thesis study in 2023.

The Hype Cycle

According to his thesis, blockchain-driven markets often surge on early optimism before crashing when expectations outpace the utility they deliver. "

"We are now moving past the hype toward a grounded phase of standard-setting." — Chun, HKUST

Chun delivers lectures to postgraduate students related to Art ID, Blockchain and NFTs for Digital Creations at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) every Thursday night.

Chun built his startup long before the pandemic and lived through the NFT boom firsthand, but he now draws a clear line between NFTs and the current business cycle of Articulator, his startup focused on title management, provenance records, digital identity, and data standardisation.

As transactions become increasingly essential in art dealing, Chun’s project leverages Articulator's de-financialised nature and transparency to encourage young artists to register their pieces for future trading.

The real long-term value, he argued, lies in making artwork more verifiable, more collateralisable and ultimately easier to connect to future RWA structures.

Chun's team, on behalf of HKUST, wins at the 51st International Exhibition of Inventions in Geneva.

Regarding the current landscape, both Chun and Ng believe the market is still in its formative stages.

Chun argues that as market trends begin to emerge, entrepreneurs should not wait for the industry to fully mature before taking action, but rather recognise that “the curve is still forming.”

“The future of RWA is certain; it is inevitable,” Ng says.

For RWA to gain significant traction in Hong Kong, Ng suggest that the city requires more than just slogans; it needs a platform where ordinary people can “feel” the technology first.

“Much like the virtual demo accounts used when opening a Futu brokerage account, you need to have a firsthand sense of it before investing real money,” he said.

Ng observed that even among his own students, who are seeking business opportunities through blockchain, some have never purchased Bitcoin or Ethereum, highlighting a widespread lack of actual experience with how virtual assets function.

He proposed that the government provide a sandbox where users can experience and understand the system before deciding whether to enter it.

For a traditional financial institution, confidentiality remains the key consideration before it decides to move from curiosity to allocation, said Ng, looking for a solid case that can convince family offices to put real money into the RWA market.

As for asset owners, creators or smaller brands who want to “go on‑chain” in a responsible way, Ng suggest them to think carefully about the following three aspects:

“First, buy other people's products yourself;”

“Second, find a good lawyer;”

“Third, mentally prepare to buy back all your product if no one is buying it.”

Chasing liquidity: HK's Practitioners Charting its way forward for Tokenised Alts