Crypto investment firm RockawayX is betting $150 million on yield becoming next big use case

Digital asset investment firm RockawayX is putting $150 million to bring more private credit and other yield-generating assets onchain, betting that lending tied to the real economy will become one of crypto’s largest markets.

The $2 billion digital-asset investment firm is rolling out Catapult, a program that will provide venture funding, product structuring, liquidity, market making and distribution for tokenized credit products, the firm told CoinDesk Thursday.

RockawayX already operates across several parts of the crypto investment stack. It runs venture funds for early-stage investments, a market-neutral fund that provides liquidity to DeFi protocols, and a vault business with roughly $300 million in deployed capital. The firm also acquired crypto hedge fund Relayer in August.

Tokenized real-world assets like bonds, equities and funds have grown rapidly to roughly $38 billion, but more than half of the market consists of tokenized money-market funds, according to RWA.xyz. RockawayX expects the market to reach between $10 trillion and $20 trillion by 2030. That’s an even more ambitious target than Citi analysts’ $5.5 trillion forecast by the end of the decade as the base case.

The next big opportunity is in assets that offer higher returns and behave differently from crypto markets, CEO Viktor Fischer said in an interview with CoinDesk.

“Our thesis going forward that after trading, yield will be the largest use case onchain” Fischer said. For that, “we need new sources of yield, 12% plus, uncorrelated to crypto,” he added.

Catapult will focus on areas including trade and supply-chain finance, specialty asset-backed securities, CLOs and real-estate-related credit.

Fischer said the appeal of putting less-liquid assets onchain is that market makers can create an exit even when the underlying investment has lengthy redemption periods.

RockawayX is looking for traditional finance professionals who know how to originate and underwrite those assets, then pair them with crypto-native operators who can help structure and distribute them onchain.

“The hard part of RWAs was never tokenization. It’s everything after: who buys the asset, where it trades and what happens when someone needs to get out,” Fischer said.