For years, RWA tokenization was tomorrow’s story. In 2026, it will officially become a reality. While retail markets often focus on speculative token price trends, far more profound changes are occurring in boring areas of the industry: trade finance, regulated credit, and treasury management. Looking ahead to 2026, it is becoming increasingly clear that the future of blockchain lies in the tokenization of real world assets (RWA), and the global epicenter of this change is Brazil.
Liqi Digital Assets and XDC Network’s recent milestone of exceeding USD 100 million in tokenized RWA is more than just a win for the two companies. This is a signal to the global financial community that the days of blockchain pilots are over. We have entered the era of institutional scale.
Brazilian exceptionalism
To understand why Brazil is leading the world in RWA tokenization, we need to look at the unique synergies between Brazilian regulators and the private sector. While other major economies struggle with regulation due to enforcement and political gridlock, Brazil’s Central Bank (BCB) and Securities and Exchange Commission (CVM) are treating blockchain as a key tool for financial modernization.
BCB’s Drex (Digital Real) project provided the country with a philosophical and technological north star. Signaling that the Brazilian real’s future lies on-chain, the government has given the green light to the country’s largest financial institution.
Currently, the participation of major companies such as Banco Itaú, Banco ABC and Banco BV is not experimental, but operational. These institutions, along with professional credit management companies like Milenio Capital, are using tokenization to solve real-world problems such as lowering the cost of capital, shortening settlement cycles, and eliminating the manual errors that have plagued credit markets for decades.
Crossing the USD 100 million threshold
In the lifecycle of financial technology, certain numbers serve as proof of life. For Liqi, the $100 million figure represents a transition from a start-up with a great idea to an institutional player in Brazil’s credit market.
This volume includes a variety of regulated assets, including corporate credit notes (CCBs) and other structured financial instruments. When you move $100 million on the blockchain, you no longer need to test whether the technology works. You are proving that your compliance, legal protection, and secondary market liquidity are robust enough for a professional trustee.
“Reaching USD 100 million is an important milestone for Liqi and for the Brazilian digital asset ecosystem,” said Daniel Coquieri, CEO of Liqi Digital Assets.
“But this is just the basics. Our target of USD 500 million in issuance by 2026 reflects a growing appetite from institutional investors who see tokenization not as a ‘cryptocurrency’ play, but as a more efficient way to manage debt and credit.”
Why infrastructure is the ultimate competitive advantage
As the RWA sector matures, the conversation is shifting from what gets tokenized to where it gets settled. For institutional issuers, choosing a blockchain network is a risk management decision.
In the early days of tokenization, many projects used Ethereum as the default due to its liquidity. However, it cannot be used for high-frequency or high-volume credit transactions because congestion charges and volatile gas fees can jump from $2 to $50 per hour. If a business is trying to settle a $5,000 credit installment, a $20 gas fee destroys the economic utility of the transaction.
This is why the XDC network has emerged as the preferred rail of the Liqi ecosystem. XDC was specifically designed for enterprise and institutional use cases, focusing on pillars that retail-centric chains often ignore.
The choice of the XDC network as the primary infrastructure for the Liqi ecosystem is the result of a focus on enterprise utility rather than retail speculation. Unlike general-purpose chains, XDC addresses unique friction points in institutional finance, including ISO 20022 compliance.
By adhering to this global messaging standard, the network ensures seamless interoperability with traditional banking systems like Swift, effectively bridging the gap between traditional ledgers and blockchain.
This is enhanced by deterministic finality, and in regulated credit markets where probabilistic settlement creates unacceptable risk, XDC provides certainty that transactions cannot be reversed within seconds. Finally, the network provides strict cost predictability.
For a high-volume issuer like Liqi, which manages hundreds of credit notes, being able to predict gas prices to the nearest penny is not just a feature, but a fundamental requirement to protect operating profits.
Diego Consimo, head of Latin America at XDC Network, puts it bluntly:
“Our partnership with Liqi highlights the strategic role of the XDC network in providing institutional-grade blockchain infrastructure for real-world asset issuance. Seeing issuance volumes grow at this pace strengthens our mission to transform the way Brazilian and Latin American institutions access cutting-edge technology with security, efficiency, and full alignment with international standards.”
Moving from pilot to scale in emerging markets
The Liqi-XDC success story highlights a broader trend of emerging markets leapfrogging Western countries in blockchain adoption. Just as mobile payments have bypassed traditional credit cards in many parts of the world, tokenization is bypassing the fragmented and slow payment systems of traditional capital markets in Latin America.
For emerging markets, the value proposition of RWA is twofold. This will give small investors access to institutional-grade yields and allow local companies to avoid expensive domestic banking transactions by leveraging global on-chain liquidity.
As Liqi and XDC move closer to their USD 500 million goal, they are effectively building a liquidity bridge linking Brazilian credit to international capital. This success is more than just a regional milestone. It establishes a replicable blueprint for financial modernization across Indonesia, India and Africa.
institutional requirements
The institutional world operates on very different strategies than the permissionless DeFi sector. For asset managers to deploy capital at scale, their infrastructure must prioritize accountability over anonymity, with identity verification and KYC verification of all participants, full audit capabilities for regulatory oversight, and recovery mechanisms to deal with default or loss of access. In this context, compliance protection is not an optional add-on. These are fundamental prerequisites for moving millions of people on-chain.
The collaboration between Liqi and XDC is successful because it tackles these unsexy requirements head-on. It combines the agility of fintech leaders with the industrial strength of blockchain built for trade finance.
Structural changes are permanent
As we look to the rest of 2026, the RWA narrative is likely to revolve around interoperability. With the USD 500 million milestone just around the corner, the next challenge will be connecting these tokenized Brazilian assets to global DeFi protocols and institutional liquidity pools in London, New York, and Singapore.
The work being done by Liqi and XDC suggests that large-scale tokenization is no longer a theory. It is happening in the São Paulo credit market and the digital ledger of the XDC network.
conclusion
Tokenization is not a trend, but a structural upgrade of the global financial system. Brazil has shown the world that with the right regulatory environment and the right technological infrastructure, the benefits of blockchain can be enjoyed today rather than in the distant future.
The US$100 million milestone is a triumph of realism over hype. This proves that if we focus on practicality, cost efficiency and institutional standards, the market will follow. For XDC Network and Liqi, the path to $500 million is more than just growth. It’s about defining new standards for how the world’s wealth is moved, managed and measured.
