Bank RWA Adoption Splits Across Dual Blockchain Rails

Banks are building on two blockchain networks at once. Public chains for markets. Permissioned systems for internal workflows. Not converging—diverging.

Marcin Kaźmierczak watched this split emerge over the past two years. The RedStone co-founder sees bank rwa adoption accelerating across parallel infrastructure—Ethereum for liquidity and composability, Canton Network for confidential settlement between counterparties.

“There are some operations between institutions that simply have to stay private, and this is the value proposition that Canton offers very effectively,” Kaźmierczak told Cointelegraph.

Not the convergence story everyone expected.

**Two Networks, Two Functions**

Public blockchains handle market-facing activity. Tokenized assets live on Ethereum—$15 billion worth as of now, part of $26.4 billion in total RWA tokens across all chains. Liquidity pools. DeFi integrations. Composability with lending protocols and tokenized vaults. That’s where price discovery happens.

Permissioned networks handle what can’t be public. Settlement between banks. Bilateral transactions. Internal asset management workflows that involve confidential client data or proprietary trading strategies. Digital Asset’s Canton Network processed $6 trillion in RWA value in 2025 using a model where transaction details stay visible only to involved parties.

That’s the architecture emerging. Dual rails.

**Why Bank RWA Adoption Follows Two Tracks**

The bank rwa adoption model stems from conflicting requirements. Markets demand transparency and liquidity. Internal operations demand confidentiality. No single blockchain architecture solves both.

Ethereum offers deep liquidity—$160 billion in stablecoins, established DeFi ecosystem, broad developer base. Every tokenized treasury fund, every on-chain bond issuance, taps into that infrastructure. Institutions need that liquidity to make tokenized markets function.

But institutions can’t expose every transaction to the public ledger. Confidential settlements between banks. Pre-trade workflows. Internal collateral management. “There are some operations between institutions that just have to stay private,” Kaźmierczak explained. “That’s the reason we want to be on both of those legs.”

Canton offers permissioned data sharing. Transactions occur on-chain but remain visible only to counterparties. Closer to existing TradFi rails than public blockchain models. Goldman Sachs, Microsoft, and Deloitte backed the network’s launch in May 2023. By September 2024, Digital Asset and the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation completed a pilot of the US Treasury Collateral Network on Canton.

RWA.xyz tracks over $313 billion in represented RWA tokens on Canton—assets using the blockchain as a recordkeeping layer rather than a settlement layer.

**The Merge Gave Institutions Confidence**

This bank rwa adoption wave didn’t start in 2024. It started in 2023, after Ethereum’s transition to proof-of-stake in 2022 removed a major question mark.

“In 2022, when I was talking to institutions, the Merge was like a big question mark for those institutions,” Kaźmierczak noted. “They saw it worked without any hiccups, so it gave them this confidence.”

RWA projects began shortly after. But institutions operate on yearly budgets and compliance timelines—nothing moves in weeks like crypto. That created a lag between internal development and public announcements.

“It’s not that they started in Q4 last year. No, they started a year before, and now we are seeing the fruits,” Kaźmierczak said.

Regulatory clarity helped. The GENIUS Act passed in 2025, establishing a federal framework for stablecoins—the settlement layer for most tokenized assets. That removed legal uncertainty around the rails institutions needed to build on.

McKinsey estimated tokenized assets could hit $2 trillion by 2030. Standard Chartered and Synpulse project $30.1 trillion by 2034. Whether those numbers hit depends partly on whether dual-rail infrastructure proves workable at scale.

**Privacy Models Diverge**

The split goes deeper than public versus permissioned. It’s about how privacy gets achieved.

Canton uses permissioned data sharing. Transactions exist on-chain but stay visible only to the parties involved. No cryptographic hiding—just access control.

Many blockchain projects pursue zero-knowledge proofs instead. ZK systems let validators verify transactions followed protocol rules without seeing transaction details. Matter Labs CEO Alex Gluchowski argued in a social media exchange with Digital Asset’s Yuval Rooz that ZK systems strengthen security. Even if administrators get compromised, attackers can’t insert invalid transactions without generating valid cryptographic proofs.

Rooz countered in a blog post that fully opaque ZK implementations could make auditing harder. If transaction data becomes entirely hidden, errors or fraud might remain undetected—recreating “black box” conditions that enabled corporate scandals like Enron.

The debate highlights an unresolved question. Financial firms are experimenting with multiple approaches to balancing privacy, verifiability, and control. No consensus yet on which model scales better for institutional use.

**What This Means for Tokenized Markets**

This bank rwa adoption pattern suggests institutional blockchain adoption won’t converge on a single network. Financial firms are building parallel infrastructure instead—public chains for liquidity, permissioned systems for operational processes behind the scenes.

That complicates interoperability. Assets might originate on Canton but need to move to Ethereum for trading. Or vice versa—assets issued on Ethereum that institutions want to settle privately. Bridges and cross-chain messaging become critical infrastructure, not optional features.

It also fragments liquidity to some degree. An RWA token on Ethereum can tap into DeFi. The same asset on Canton can’t—at least not directly. That creates inefficiencies but solves compliance problems public chains can’t address.

For now, institutions seem willing to accept that trade-off. Dual rails serve dual purposes.

Question is whether that architecture persists or whether one rail eventually dominates. Canton offers privacy institutions need today. But if ZK-proofs mature enough to deliver confidentiality on public chains, the calculus shifts.

Next 24 months will show whether dual rails become permanent infrastructure or a transitional phase.