Tokenizing The World: Arbitrum, Vechain, Dwf Labs & Uae Officials Speak At Blockchain Life Dubai 2025

What Happened

At Blockchain Life 2025 in Dubai, a panel titled “Tokenization of Real-World Assets: A New Era of Investing” examined how blockchain is reshaping traditional finance.

The session was moderated by Alevtina Labyuk, Chief Strategic Partnerships Officer at BeInCrypto.

The panel featured Brendan Ma, Head of Investment Strategy at Arbitrum Foundation; Antonio Senatore, CTO at VeChain; Andrei Grachev, Managing Partner at DWF Labs; and Khalifa AlShehhi, Chairman at the Metaverse Committee at the UAE Ministry of Economy and Tourism.

At the beginning of the discussion, Brendan Ma, Head of Investment Strategy at the Arbitrum Foundation, framed tokenization as more than a passing trend. He described it as the natural progression of global markets toward open rails. He explained:

From there, the conversation turned to how tokenization is shifting into a corporate strategy. Andrei Grachev of DWF Labs approached it from the investor’s angle.

Market Context

“Over the last 12 months, we’ve seen multi-billion dollar companies go public. We’ve seen Wall Street embrace digital assets, cryptocurrency. We’ve seen tokens or tokenization plays by some of the biggest institutions in the world on blockchains that we all know and love. It’s important because the institutional market is extremely significant. And I think we’re still very early.”

Ma referred to Arbitrum’s internal data. The network secures more than $18 billion in value across DeFi, payments, and RWA applications, with around $1 billion already tokenized on-chain. Yet, compared with the $100 trillion global equity market, this remains a fraction of the potential.

“And I think we’re moving towards a phase where almost every single asset that can be more composable, that can unlock liquidity, that can be accessible across different markets, will go on this march towards tokenization. It’s a phenomenally significant opportunity, and it’s something that basically every institution in the world is trying to grasp with both hands.”

When Liquidity Becomes the Story

He explained that two forces are shaping the market’s momentum. The first is the rise of tokenized stocks, which create arbitrage opportunities for traders and increase overall market activity.

“This is the distribution that never happened before. With a tokenized nature of reward assets, these products are going to be available for 24/7 trading and settlement. From my point of view, in the near future, these two markets should merge and unlock 24/7 weekend settlement and looping strategies and DeFi transparency for trade-free assets.”

However, Grachev cautioned that yield and liquidity only matter if holders can exit. According to him, without reliable secondary markets or enforceable redemption, tokenized assets drift toward speculation rather than finance.

“If we don’t have trust to the tokenization framework, this market will be developed very, very slowly because people will be afraid to give this money, people will be afraid to lend this money or buy this assets. And this framework is very, very important part.”

Why It Matters

Real-world asset (RWA) tokenization has become one of the most credible bridges from crypto to traditional finance. Once viewed as an experimental niche, it now commands serious institutional interest, with over $32 billion in tokenized assets live on-chain, according to data from rwa.xyz.

Institutions Lead the March Toward Tokenization

Details

He added:

Ma used Robinhood’s expansion in the EU as an example of early milestones. Through Arbitrum, Robinhood customers can now trade roughly 644 tokenized equities directly inside their existing app.

More than 10,000 transactions have been processed, with cumulative gas costs of only $130. Ma continued:

“When we think about the opportunity when it comes to tokenizing assets, it’s about increasing inclusion, increasing accessibility, increasing the types of use cases that are seamless. Customers don’t have to understand the technical complexity. They can simply trade and use technology that works.”

Meanwhile, the second is the emergence of crypto-native yields. Grachev pointed out that several banks, including Société Générale, are now tokenizing fixed-income products and running looping strategies on-chain. He argued:

Grachev stressed:

Regulation as a Runway for Tokenized Assets

Representing the government’s view, Mr. Khalifa AlShehhi, Chairman at the Metaverse Committee at the UAE Ministry of Economy and Tourism, spoke about policy as an enabler rather than a constraint.

“We consider the regulation actually is a runway, which means we need to make sure we path the way for the technology to be accepted. Because, as we are all aware, that development is much faster than the regulation maturity or the regulation development.”— Khalifa AlShehhi