Consensus Hong Kong 2026 was, by many accounts, an RWA conference that happened to be about crypto. Across main stages, side events, and sponsored panels, real-world asset tokenization dominated the conversation — but not in the way it did a year ago.

The pitch decks have given way to genuine disagreements about architecture, regulation, and what tokenization actually solves. Here’s what’s actually being argued.

Stablecoins Are RWA — and Everyone Now Agrees

One of the clearest points of consensus was that the most successful RWA already exists. “The most successful RWA is USDT,” said CJ Fong, Managing Director and Head of APAC and EMEA Sales at GSR, during a panel at the main conference.

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At the Gate’s side event, Chunda McCain, co-founder of Paxos Labs, described surging demand for PAXG, the firm’s gold-backed token, as evidence that stablecoins are expanding beyond dollar pegs into commodities and treasuries. Paxos secured its OCC conditional license in December and holds regulatory approvals in Singapore, Finland, and Abu Dhabi — a multi-jurisdictional strategy built around the assumption that stablecoins and tokenized assets are converging.

Brian Mehler, CEO of payment blockchain Stable, reinforced the point from the infrastructure side. His company’s USDT Zero system eliminates gas fees entirely — send 100 USDT, and 99.999 USDT arrives. At the Stablecoin Odyssey side event, Mehler compared the goal to Swift: the user shouldn’t know they’re on a blockchain.

The implication is that the stablecoin-RWA boundary is increasingly artificial. As stablecoins back themselves with T-bills, gold, and structured products, and as RWA platforms settle in USDC, the two categories are merging into a single tokenized finance layer.

The Architecture War: Permissioned vs Permissionless

The sharpest disagreement at the conference came from two companies that nominally do the same thing.

At the Consensus mainstage session “Tokenizing the Planet,” Graham Ferguson, Head of Ecosystem at Securitize, and Min Lin, Managing Director of Global Expansion at Ondo, laid out fundamentally different visions.

Securitize advocates for native token issuance under a permissioned framework. Ferguson argued that wrapper models — where an existing off-chain asset is wrapped into an on-chain token — create distance between the underlying asset and the investor, weakening protection. With BlackRock’s BUIDL fund surpassing $1 billion in AUM, he pointed to the track record of issuing securities directly on-chain with compliance built in.

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Ondo takes the opposite path: permissionless wrappers that prioritize DeFi composability and global distribution. Min Lin argued that the model integrates more quickly with existing DeFi protocols and removes gatekeepers, an advantage particularly relevant for reaching investors across Asia. The company is actively expanding into Hong Kong, Singapore, and Japan.

In a follow-up interview with BeInCrypto, Ferguson questioned whether wrapper models can provide adequate investor protection. He also detailed Securitize’s plans to expand DeFi partnerships while maintaining its permissioned architecture.

The binary may already be outdated, though. At Stablecoin Odyssey’s RWA panel, Conflux CSO Forgiven described a live hybrid case: renewable energy assets packaged by a financial company and wrapped into a DeFi protocol. It’s a permissionless distribution of a regulated, real-world asset — a structure that doesn’t fit neatly into either camp.

Settlement Speed: The Argument That Keeps Winning

If one claim was repeated most across venues, it was that tokenization’s killer feature isn’t access or transparency — it’s speed.

Conflux’s Forgiven offered the most concrete benchmark: deposit USDC, receive immediate confirmation; request redemption, get USDC back within one hour. “Faster than T+0,” he noted, against traditional settlement cycles that can stretch to days.

The composability argument extends this further. Multiple panelists across sessions noted a limitation in traditional finance. Buying an asset and using it as collateral immediately is structurally impossible. On-chain, it’s native functionality.

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Stable’s Mehler highlighted a practical pain point that bridges theory and reality: during the recent market selloff, ETH gas price volatility doubled transaction costs for businesses moving stablecoins. His fixed-cost USDT transfer model eliminates that variable, which matters when enterprises are processing thousands of transactions daily.

Physical Assets: Where the Narrative Meets Friction

The precious metals session at HashKey Cloud’s event provided a reality check. Ronald Tan, Director of Silver Times Limited, walked through the logistics of the silver market: warehouse costs, transportation challenges, and US-China export restrictions that don’t vanish when a token is minted.

This is the gap between financial RWA and physical RWA. Treasuries and fund shares can settle instantly because the underlying asset is already recorded in the ledger. Metals, energy, and real estate require verification that the physical asset exists and is properly custodied.

Paxos’s PAXG experience — gold tokens backed by allocated bars in London vaults — shows it can work at scale, but McCain acknowledged the company is committing additional resources to meet surging demand. The infrastructure for physical-asset tokenization is real, but far from trivial.

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Asia as the Center of Gravity

Across all sessions, Asia — and Hong Kong specifically — emerged as the gravitational center of the RWA narrative.

Ondo is targeting Hong Kong, Singapore, and Japan for expansion. Securitize’s Ferguson told BeInCrypto that the company would prioritize jurisdictions with regulatory clarity, naming the same cities. Paxos already holds a Singapore MAS license. HashKey, as both an event host and a market participant, anchored multiple panels on Hong Kong’s positioning.

Forgiven of Conflux described its company as a rare Chinese blockchain project using real names. Its renewable energy RWA product was designed specifically for the Hong Kong market.

The subtext is clear: while US regulatory battles over stablecoin legislation and the Clarity Act continue — a point Anthony Scaramucci made forcefully in his own Consensus appearance — Asia is building the infrastructure and establishing the precedents.

What’s Actually at Stake

The RWA conversation at Consensus Hong Kong revealed an industry that has moved past the question of whether tokenization will happen. The arguments now center on how—permissioned or permissionless, financial or physical, institutional or retail-first—and the answers are diverging by asset class, jurisdiction, and business model.

The stablecoin-RWA convergence may prove to be the most consequential shift. If the most successful tokenized assets are stablecoins, and stablecoins are increasingly backed by real-world assets, the entire framing of RWA as a separate sector may not survive 2026.

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