Lithuania: the crypto bank Meld offers RWAs to retail investors

The Lithuanian crypto bank, Meld, together with Swarm Markets, a DeFi platform, will offer retail investors Real Asset Tokenized – RWA.

Lithuania: Meld crypto bank and the offer of tokenized RWA to retail investors

Meld, the crypto bank in Lithuania, has formed a new partnership with the DeFi platform Swarm Markets, to offer tokenized RWA – Real World Assets to retail investors.

Partnership MELD @SwarmMarkets A powerful alliance that opens up the expected trillion-dollar real-world asset (RWA) market to retail investors. MELD’s RWAs, powered by Swarm, will be integrated into the MELD lending protocol, giving users the ability to borrow RWA assets such as $AAPL or $TSLA stocks. “Our partnership with Swarm opens up endless opportunities to create interesting types of RWAs and cryptocurrencies on themes like AI, DeFi, gaming, and NFTs. The MELD Lending & Borrowing protocol will even support borrowing against your RWAs.” – Gediminas Kiveris, Chief Investment Officer of MELD. Our MoU with Swarm enables us to obtain compliant RWA assets for retail investors across Europe and beyond. Starting with the 75,000 and more users on the waiting list for early access to the MELD Neobank. We are excited to bridge the gap and bring new possibilities to this sector of finance. Stay tuned.”

Basically, on one side there is Swarm, which obtained a license from the German financial regulatory authority, created a RWA trading platform in December of last year.

On the other hand, there will be Meld, a crypto-friendly bank, as well as a blockchain layer-1, which will want to offer retail investors loans and mortgages against tokenized real-world assets (RWA).

Lithuania: crypto bank Meld partners with Swarm to offer loans and mortgages on RWA

The sector of tokenized RWAs, which refers to the trading of “traditional” asset classes such as stocks, bonds, and even real estate on the blockchain, is expected to become a multi-billion dollar activity in some sectors of the crypto industry.

On this note, Meld has already registered 75,000 potential customers for early access to its platform.

Legally, Meld has also obtained the license to provide virtual asset service provider (VASP) in Lithuania.

In theory, in this way, it should facilitate the crypto-friendly bank to obtain equivalent licenses in other Member States of the European Union, thanks to the MiCA (Market in Crypto Assets) regulation of the bloc.

Iota and the tokenized real-world asset industry

In mid-December 2023, the news leaked that even the open-source blockchain of Iota has started to make its way into the industry of tokenized real-world assets, the RWA.

And indeed, Iota would have hooked up its ShimmerEVM compatible network with the crypto custody service provider Fireblocks.

So, on one hand Shimmer acts as an infrastructure for testing new applications and offers the possibility to develop smart contracts on environments like Iota’s, on the other hand Fireblock is the custody service that also supports tokenized RWAs.

This integration should allow to improve Iota’s offering in the tokenization of real assets with a focus on security and simplicity of such processes.