The Future of Real World Assets

Transcript

Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Kyle Samani. I'm the chairman at Forward Industries and also now a startup founder and I previously founded Multicoin and was pretty early investor in and around the Solana ecosystem. Today I'm going to be talking about trading real world assets on Solana and also how to think about other ways people are getting price exposure to equities on chain today. >> [clears throat] >> So let first let's talk about quick context and history how we got here. This is chart looking at the value growth of RWAs on Solana over the last 20 21 months or so.

At the beginning of last year, there were about 200 million dollars worth of RWAs on Solana. That excludes stablecoins. As of October 1st, that number is closer to 4.3 billion. We can think about this growth is happening in kind of three waves. The first wave was really Ondo, BlackRock and Franklin Templeton were the first to kind of pioneer money market funds and T-bills on chain. The second wave really was led by X stocks which launched in about June of 2025.

And then the third wave I think is even more recent really starting this past June with Backed Backed Securities and Sunrise. That has really accelerated the growth pretty substantially. Also worth noting that Forward where I'm on the board is the the issue that we issued our equity on chain in December of last year and we're actually the first on chain security to ever be used as collateral in DeFi. Um You know, Hyperliquid has kind of approached equities in a pretty different way. Obviously Hyperliquid is famous for being a place to trade perps and they have the largest and deepest book of on chain perp liquidity in the world by a pretty good margin.

The the they've been facilitating trading equities um is using these perps, and you know, they have about 4.4 billion or so of OI uh on equity perps as of now, and they did about 60 billion in in uh trading volume in perps in Q3. So, about 15 million a month. now, what's interesting about this is that with these perps, no one actually owns the equity, you know, they they own just a financial contract that settles in USDC. Solana really went the other way. They focused first on spot markets um at bringing those shares on chain. Um as of today, there's more than a million wallets on the Solana blockchain that are holding tokenized equity, and that number is ramping up pretty aggressively.

I want to talk a little bit about how kind of Solana now is um the next the most recent wave of growth of these on-chain equities. Um looking at kind of layers of the stack here. Uh the first layer of the stack and the foundational one is Backpack Securities, uh where I'm also fortunate to be on the board and work closely with Armani and the rest of the team there. Um Backpack has a register the a qualified custodian, they're a registered broker-dealer, they're a money transmitter. They have actually more licensure at this point than basically any company in the world in financial services. Um and so, they are uh issuing equities one-for-one. Any retail user uh who's registered with Backpack can go issue uh or excuse me, create tokenized securities, redeem them, and move back and forth seamlessly.

Um in the last three or four months, they've issued about 41 assets and done about 7 billion or so in volume. The next layer of the stack is a company called Sunrise. Um and these these guys are focused on making really one canonical representation of each of these assets on chain. Um and they're working with all of the major online liquidity providers and venues such as Radium, Orca, Jupiter, and others to make sure that liquidity concentrates very quickly around these names. Um the next layer up the stack then is Phoenix for derivatives. Um obviously, you can you can trade derivatives with USDC as collateral, but actually just a couple of weeks ago Phoenix rolled out the ability to use Solana as collateral in their derivatives.

And over the next few weeks and a couple months, they're going to be rolling out all major assets including Bitcoin ETH, Zcash hype, but also even Apple, Nvidia, Google, SpaceX, you know, all the major equities you would expect. And so what you're going to be able to do here in the next month or two is take an portfolio of spot equities, use it as collateral, and trade arbitrary derivatives positions on top of that. It's a really powerful unlock kind of a vision of financial efficiency that so many people in the market have been working towards for the last few years. And you can see that the pieces are here now and it's just a couple months from getting to fruition.

And then you know, on top of all of that there's going to be opportunities then to build new kinds of financial products, new kinds of user interfaces. On top of that, my new company that I'm working on called Darwin is going to be exploring a lot of these ideas over the coming months. But there's a perps are a little bit complicated for people to understand and there's going to be a lot of interesting new ways to to learn how to trade perps and take advantage of their interesting tax properties, liquidity, 24/7 trading, and other things. Now, you know, over the last 13 14 months the number of tokens equities trading on Solana has gone from about 10 to about 4 340 or so and actually as as of end of September 1200 now.

That's between all of the major issuers. The big reason why tokenized equities is taking off on Solana is because of the ability for anyone to redeem create and redeem tokens. Um this is important because you know, people trade Apple on NYSE and Nasdaq. That's where most of the volume is. It's very easy for the price of those same assets on chain to diverge from the underlying venues. Um you you know, the way to guarantee that the prices stay close together is to have the ability not just for big trading firms, but for truly anyone including the people in this room, to be able to move back and forth and arbitrage prices to keep them in line across these venues.

This is why it's been the core design of Backpack Securities from day one to ensure this property can can exist. We've seen over the last couple of months on nights and weekends, particularly on Robinhood chain, the price of on-chain equities is 2 3 4 5 X what it what what it is in NYSE and Nasdaq. And and obviously that's really bad for users, and so you want to make sure you design the system to guarantee that doesn't happen. Um obviously the uh So, with all of that, guys, I just wanted to give an overview of kind of how we think about um on-chain equities and perps at Forward and some of the really cool and interesting opportunities that are coming ahead.

Thank you.