By Joaquin Mendes, chief operating officer of Taiko
For most of human history value moved directly between parties: goods or land exchanged for money, agreed upon by buyer and seller. Over centuries, banks, brokers and custodians inserted themselves into that relationship, deciding prices, controlling access and constraining how people transact.
Today, institutional interest in tokenizing real-world assets (RWAs) is surging. But how we build that infrastructure will determine whether tokenization democratizes markets or simply re-creates old hierarchies onchain. Many incumbents default to permissioned blockchains, centralized layer-2 solutions or private networks. Those approaches bring back gatekeepers in new guises: permissioned chains limit who may participate and under what terms, centralized rollups create single points of control, and private networks let operators restrict interoperability and censor activity.
Consider a $10 million property split into 10,000 tokens. On a permissioned or centralized platform, each trade can require approval. Price discovery and access become subject to platform rules rather than a direct negotiation between buyer and seller. The blockchain may only have replaced a visible middleman with an invisible one.
Why do firms choose control? Mostly regulatory anxiety. Authorities expect identity verification, transaction monitoring and enforceability. The reflexive solution is centralization: one operator who can freeze assets or reverse transactions when regulators demand it. Firms fear legal liability and recreate familiar centralized controls onchain.
But centralization also raises regulatory and systemic risk. A centralized blockchain operator can itself become a regulated intermediary, facing custody, licensing and liability obligations. That undermines the decentralization promise, concentrates failure modes and recreates single points of control that blockchain was supposed to eliminate.
A better route meets regulatory objectives without reintroducing gatekeepers. KYC, monitoring and enforcement can be enforced at the application layer while settlement occurs on public, permissionless infrastructure. Public rollups that inherit Ethereum’s security offer a practical blend: decentralized sequencing and settlement, provable finality, and the ability for applications to implement compliance controls.
With base-layer security and permissionless settlement, applications can require identity verification and compliance checks offchain or at the application level while relying on a trust-minimized ledger for final settlement. Well-designed rollups provide low-cost, high-speed transactions with institutional-grade settlement guarantees, and they keep the integrity of the ledger tied to cryptographic and economic consensus rather than to a single human operator.
This design reduces operational risk, enhances auditability and aligns with regulators’ needs for transparency. It preserves the open, permissionless rails that enable broader participation rather than locking access behind new corporate gates.
The stakes are large: the RWA market could grow to trillions of dollars. The infrastructure choices we make now will shape whether tokenized assets expand access or entrench existing concentration of wealth and control. Continuing down the path of permissioned or centralized solutions risks freezing old barriers into next-generation systems.
Ethereum and its rollup model already demonstrate a viable alternative: permissionless settlement, inherited security and an environment where compliance can be implemented without a privileged operator. Embracing rollup infrastructure lets institutions meet regulatory demands while preserving decentralization and interoperability.
Rejecting legacy workarounds and avoiding the creation of new gatekeepers will better position tokenized RWAs to deliver fairer, more open markets.
This article reflects the author’s opinion and not necessarily the views of any publisher. Readers should perform their own due diligence before acting on this content.