Most RWA talk is about bonds and treasuries. Meanwhile the consumer IP market is worth $90B+ and is almost entirely illiquid. Here's why "unsexy" RWAs will be the next big onchain vertical. There is a significant consumer market for IP that people already care about, such as anime/Trading Card Game, tickets, and domains, among others. The playbook is (kinda) simple: make high-demand assets easy to own and trade with a Web2-style UX, while DeFi is leveraged behind the scenes for liquidity and settlement. And this is happening at a historical moment when U.S. regulators are leaning toward broader access to advanced products, and exchanges are rolling out more “exotic” offerings. On the DeFi side, activity has also shifted from memecoin trading to more productive use cases. We’re seeing it in the RWA boom and the growing stablecoin supply, in Aave ranking as the 37th-largest “bank” by deposits (with the key difference that Aave is fully reserved while banks are fractional, otherwise it’d rank even higher), and in the rise of new sectors like ComputeFi and PayFi. The transition from purely speculative use cases that have characterized 2024 to more “real” applications this year is very real and hard to miss. Even the recent surge in collectibles trading indicates the same, with several projects seeing heavy adoption, including: • @ripdotfun • @Courtyard_io • @beezie_io IP TOKENIZATION: A CLOSER LOOK In a recent article, @Forbes highlighted how ‘unsexy RWAs’ like IP rights and carbon credits are quietly moving onchain, and become far more useful once they do. That said, I’m skeptical about carbon credits. Many are low quality, and it takes serious due diligence to separate the good from the bad. IP, however, is a real opportunity. It’s a major growth driver, contributing about $6.6T annually in the U.S. and close to 40% of GDP across developed economies. Patents, trademarks, copyrights, and trade secrets all drive innovation, support brand value, and create competitive advantages across industries. Tokenization takes this further: real-time pricing based on supply, demand, and market sentiment turns all these from static, illiquid assets into something liquid and tradable. Here is more data to give you an idea of how big these markets are: MARKET SNAPSHOTS The global Trading Card Game (TCG) market is valued at $7.8 billion and projected to grow to $11.8 billion by 2030. Has to be pointed out that the TCG demand is cyclical, driven by liquidity and macro conditions. Zooming out, the global anime market was $81.96B in 2024. Here, the notable thing is the dominance of Japan, which accounts for over 40% of that number. The Association of Japanese Animations (AJA) reports Japan’s animation industry generated ~$22B in 2023. (Other data from Precedence Research) At the start, I mentioned domains, and you'll be surprised by how big this market also is. A market that saw 378.6 million domains registered in 2024, with different sources (Straits Research, Market Data Forecast, e.g.) valuing the sector around $2.4B and projecting strong growth thanks to digital marketing and e-commerce's growth. It's an industry that has been (almost) completely illiquid; you either own a domain or you don’t. Tokenization would disrupt this industry completely by enabling fractional ownership, secondary markets, and domain-backed lending for the first time. And domains are actually a great asset to be tokenized. They aren’t speculative, as they have real utility in the internet's infrastructure. And they’re natively digital, which makes issuance and management far simpler, no messy off-chain ↔ on-chain bridging. Bottom line: Projects focused on these “unsexy” RWAs are solving real liquidity problems in established markets. Most tokenization attention (mine included, tbh) goes to credit, treasuries, and other headline assets. But there’s a huge, untapped consumer market in assets people already want to own and trade. RECENT CASE STUDY: OASYS CHAIN @oasyschain is an EVM L1 that has expanded its focus from pure gaming to a consumer-grade RWA/IP chain. One standout app in their ecosystem is @TCGSTORE_io, which lets users buy Pokémon and other popular trading cards directly onchain. A marketplace like this could plausibly clear ~$200M/year in card sales; at a 1.5% take rate, that’s ~$3M/year in trading commissions alone. Apart from that, it's worth highlighting the traction they're getting in the other sectors, particularly in the Japanese market. The team recently announced a collaboration with GATES, Inc. (a Japanese real estate firm), with a plan to tokenize $75M worth of Tokyo real estate. The same firm also outlined plans to tokenize up to $200B of property, nearly 1% of Japan’s market. This is also quite interesting as Japan’s real estate market has historically been hard for global investors to access due to regulatory friction, legal complexity, and language barriers. This will require them to satisfy the regulatory requirements, so it has to be seen in the long term how things will evolve. Most likely, more firms will follow with similar initiatives and pressure regulators to ease rules and enable broader access. Overall, this mirrors what’s happening in pre-IPO markets, another huge, under-tapped area that’s likely to grow quickly over the next months. If you’re curious, here’s a deeper dive: THE TECH Oasys architecture resembles that of other networks (@RaylsLabs, @avax, e.g.), tailored for institutions that can seamlessly spin up their own environment, fitting their needs: • Hub Layer (L1): A public, EVM chain that acts as the settlement layer for the whole ecosystem. • Verse Layers (L2s): Permissioned, app-specific rollups based on the OP Stack. Each Verse operator controls who can deploy contracts and which transactions are allowed. A key UX choice of "Verses" is that they're gasless for users. The operator sponsors gas and recovers costs via app fees, rev-share, or other ways. To create one of these L2s, you need to stake 1M+ $OAS (currently ~$11,000). Why this setup works: Enterprises get custom rules and a smoother UX on their own L2, while the Hub stays lean. That keeps throughput high and lets the ecosystem scale horizontally without congesting the main network. CLOSING THOUGHTS Ultimately, the next big step for tokenization isn’t more bonds onchain (or at least, not just that), it’s IP and other “exotic” consumer assets people already own and trade. As the market matures, expect more chains built for this purpose (ideally without founders exiting five months post-TGE). Oasys is an example of that shift: if it keeps onboarding IP and turning it into active secondary markets, the flywheel is obvious: More creators/issuers → more collectors → deeper liquidity → more creators/issuers → more revenue.