Tokenization has been the industry's default answer for bringing traditional finance on-chain: take a bond, a stock, a treasury bill, and issue a blockchain-based token representing direct ownership of it. DWF Labs' Martin Lee argues in a recent opinion piece that a different mechanism — perpetual futures on real-world asset (RWA) prices — will actually scale faster, precisely because it avoids the hardest parts of tokenization altogether.
This article covers what separates direct tokenization from a perpetual futures wrapper, why sidestepping custody and settlement is a real structural advantage rather than a shortcut, and what tradeoff that advantage comes with.
Two very different ways to get exposure to the same asset
Tokenization means issuing a blockchain token that represents direct, redeemable ownership of an underlying asset — a tokenized bond is supposed to be backed one-to-one by an actual bond a custodian holds. That direct link is what makes tokenization valuable, but it's also what makes it hard: someone has to actually custody the real bond, handle its settlement when it's traded, and comply with the securities regulations that govern that specific asset class in whatever jurisdiction the token circulates.
A perpetual futures contract (perp) is a derivative — an agreement whose value tracks an underlying asset's price without granting ownership of the asset itself. A perp on gold's price lets a trader gain or lose money as gold moves, without ever touching a gold bar, a custodian, or the physical commodities market. Applying that same structure to real-world assets means a trader gets price exposure to, say, a basket of U.S. equities, without the platform needing to actually hold and custody those equities.
Why removing custody and settlement is the actual unlock
The hardest part of bringing traditional finance on-chain was never the blockchain technology — it was the custody, settlement, and compliance obligations tied to actually owning a regulated real-world asset. Perps make those obligations someone else's problem by removing direct ownership from the equation entirely.
Direct tokenization inherits every regulatory obligation that already applies to the underlying asset — securities law for tokenized equities, banking regulation for tokenized deposits, and so on — because the token is a claim on the real thing. A perpetual futures contract on that same asset's price is a different legal instrument with its own (often lighter, though jurisdiction-dependent) regulatory treatment, since no one is claiming ownership of the underlying security itself.
That difference in regulatory posture is what Lee's argument leans on: perps can plausibly scale faster because they don't require solving the custody and compliance problem for every individual asset class before offering exposure to it. A platform can list a perp on an asset's price much faster than it can stand up compliant custody infrastructure for the asset itself.
The tradeoff perps don't escape
Faster scaling comes at a real cost: a perp holder has price exposure, not ownership. There's no underlying bond to redeem, no equity share with voting rights, no direct claim on the asset the price is tracking. For traders who only care about price movement, that's an acceptable — even preferable — tradeoff, since it comes with more efficient capital use and typically deeper liquidity than a nascent tokenized market.
But it means perps and tokenization aren't actually substitutes for every use case — they serve different demand. An institution that wants a compliant, auditable claim on a real bond for balance-sheet purposes needs tokenization's direct ownership structure; a trader who wants leveraged price exposure without custody overhead is better served by a perp. Lee's argument that perps will "outpace" tokenization is really an argument that trading-oriented demand is larger and faster-growing than ownership-oriented demand — a claim about market composition, not a claim that tokenization becomes obsolete.
What this means for builders
Platforms deciding how to bring a new real-world asset class on-chain now have a genuine architectural choice, and the right answer depends on the target user. A trading-focused product should default to a perpetual futures wrapper — it ships faster and doesn't require solving custody first. A product targeting institutional balance sheets or regulated investment vehicles still needs the harder, slower work of actual tokenized ownership, because a derivative doesn't satisfy that use case no matter how liquid it becomes.
The two approaches will likely coexist rather than one displacing the other — expect protocols to increasingly offer both a tokenized version for ownership-seeking capital and a perp market for trading-seeking capital on the same underlying asset.
Conclusion
Perpetual futures scaling faster than direct tokenization wouldn't be a failure of tokenization — it would be a sign that most near-term demand for real-world asset exposure on-chain is trading demand, not ownership demand. That's a useful distinction for anyone building in this space: the question isn't which mechanism wins, but which mechanism matches the actual demand you're building for.