RockawayX, a digital-asset investment firm managing about $2 billion, has committed $150 million to a programme called Catapult to bring trade finance, private credit and other yield-bearing assets onchain, CoinDesk reported on Wednesday. The money will back products in supply-chain finance, specialty asset-backed securities, collateralised loan obligations and real estate credit, areas where returns depend on borrowers rather than on crypto prices.
Chief executive Viktor Fischer said the firm’s thesis is that yield will become the largest use of blockchains after trading, and that investors want new sources of return of 12 percent or more that do not move with crypto markets. RockawayX already runs venture funds, a market-neutral fund and a vault business with about $300 million deployed, and bought the crypto hedge fund Relayer in August.
Tokenised real-world assets are worth around $38 billion today, and RockawayX projects that market could reach $10 trillion to $20 trillion by 2030. Fischer’s own description of the challenge is more modest than the forecast. The hard part, he said, was never issuing the token but everything that follows: who buys the asset, where it trades and what happens when a holder needs to get out.
That is the question $150 million does not answer. RockawayX has not given a timetable for deploying the money or named the people it plans to recruit from traditional finance and crypto to run it. Private credit pays 12 percent partly because it is illiquid and hard to price, and wrapping a loan in a token does not change the borrower. The first default on a public chain will say more about this market than any 2030 projection.
