Real World Assets (RWAs) are shaping up to be one of the most transformative themes in blockchain for 2026. RWAs are set to dominate capital markets, bringing traditional assets, like real estate, private credit, and invoices, onto public ledgers and promising to unlock vast pools of liquidity and efficiency.
Ethereum itself has recently highlighted dozens of real-world institutional tokenization initiatives where financial institutions have already begun committing to on-chain infrastructure.
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But as the momentum builds, one critical challenge still stands in the way: confidentiality.
While public blockchains are increasingly being recognized as the long-term settlement layer for global finance, tokenization brings transparency, and with it, a fundamental dilemma for businesses. Sensitive financial data and proprietary deal structures cannot simply be exposed to a public blockchain. Without built-in privacy, the promise of tokenizing trillions in real-world assets remains incomplete.
So despite recent momentum, most enterprise deployments remain constrained to private or permissioned environments, not due to lack of demand, but due to the absence of confidentiality on public chains.
The Confidentiality Challenge
The bottom line is that businesses need confidentiality in order to achieve compliance. They need to prevent unauthorized access to sensitive business data while allowing regulators and auditors visibility where needed. Privacy is crucial to foster institutional adoption.
Today’s public blockchains were not designed with privacy in mind, and most tokens expose ownership and transfer details by default. This creates friction for use cases involving proprietary financial instruments. Enterprise participation has therefore been slow to fully adopt the technological and economic benefits of tokenization.
So why seek out public blockchains?
Public networks offer neutral infrastructure, shared security, global liquidity, and open standards that private systems simply cannot replicate at scale.
The benefits for enterprises to use public chains:
Reducing long-term operational and counterparty risk
Enabling asset portability across venues
Unlocking composability with broader financial ecosystems
The preference for private chains today is therefore not philosophical, but practical, until confidentiality and compliance can be guaranteed on public infrastructure.
We are seeing this friction play out in real time. NYSE recently announced its intention to launch the development of its own closed platform for tokenized securities, while banks like JPMorgan and Citi, via the Kinexys platform, continue to roll out tokenized deposit pilots. These, and similar initiatives, predominantly utilize private, permissioned ledgers to shield proprietary trade data from competitors.
From Pilots to Production
Collaborative industry efforts are now making headway and helping set the foundation for institutions, asset managers, and corporations, to tokenize sensitive assets in the public domain, without compromising confidentiality or regulatory oversight. COTI is well positioned to capture this market early.
COTI’s Leadership in Confidential RWAs
COTI is positioning itself at the forefront of a new movement that enables enterprise-grade confidential applications on public blockchains. Leveraging Garbled Circuits technology, a breakthrough cryptographic protocol offering computation up to 3,000× faster than alternatives and 250× lighter in computational demand, COTI has developed infrastructure that enables truly scalable confidential RWAs.
COTI is purpose-built for compliant privacy. Its Garbled Circuits layer ensures that tokens and their TX history, ownership, and metadata can remain private regardless of computational complexity, including supporting multi-party use cases.
At the same time, programmable privacy enables selective disclosure to satisfy regulatory requirements such as KYC and AML.
This approach aligns with emerging global regulatory frameworks, including Singapore’s Project Guardian, by the Monetary Authority of Singapore, which recently released guidance on operationalizing tokenized funds. Regulators are increasingly demanding systems that allow compliance verification without publicly exposing granular transaction data, exactly what COTI enables.
By integrating confidentiality directly into token logic at the protocol layer, COTI addresses the final barrier preventing real-world assets from achieving wide-scale adoption on public blockchains. EVM compatibility allows developers to build in familiar environments using Solidity, while lightweight computation ensures accessibility across devices and environments.
The Road Ahead
RWAs have already proven their potential to bring trillions of dollars in traditional assets onto blockchain rails. Yet for this transition to reach its full potential, financial privacy must be integrated as a foundational feature, not an afterthought.
COTI’s Garbled Circuits implementation delivers a unique combination of speed, scalability, and compliance tailored specifically to enterprise RWA requirements, laying the foundation for large-scale privacy-first infrastructure.
The final piece of the puzzle is ready to bring Real-World Assets on-chain.
For COTI updates and to join the conversation, be sure to check out our channels:
Website: https://coti.io/
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GitHub: https://github.com/coti-io