Re-Engineering Capital Markets: Tokenization, AI Agents, and the Future of RWA

Welcome to an exclusive interview with Julian Kwan, Co-Founder and CEO of IXS.

In today's rapidly evolving financial landscape, the bridge between traditional institutional investing and the emerging world of digital assets is becoming increasingly important. Julian Kwan sits at the heart of this evolution, leading IXS, a licensed real-world asset (RWA) infrastructure provider and settlement layer designed to bridge institutional capital to EVM chains. Through its full-stack issuance and distribution platform, IXS enables the seamless creation, management, and trading of tokenized assets, combining the regulatory rigor of traditional finance with the speed and composability of DeFi.

Background & Experience

Q: You've worked at the intersection of traditional capital markets and tokenized assets — what experiences most shaped your decision to focus on real-world asset tokenization infrastructure?

A: I previously developed some real estate projects and wanted to get into the intersection of internet and investments. So we started a private equity real estate platform. Then came the ICO boom and we immediately saw that all money would be tokenized and therefore all securities should be to. So this was the driver of us moving full time into tokenization at the beginning of the industry in 2018. We also believed key infrastructure to issue and trade RWA would capture the most value in this new economy, so thats what we built.

Q: IXS is positioned as a full-stack issuance and distribution platform — what gaps in existing capital markets or Web3 tooling motivated you to build this model?

A: Two gaps that nobody was solving simultaneously. On the traditional side, issuance was slow, expensive, and locked behind intermediary layers that added cost without adding value. On the crypto side, there was liquidity and speed but zero regulatory legitimacy, you could move assets fast but you could not put institutional-grade products on those rails without breaking securities law. We built IXS to sit exactly between those two worlds. Licensed enough for Fidelity and BlackRock to distribute through us. Open enough for DeFi composability and on-chain secondary trading. That combination does not exist anywhere else under a single regulatory stack.

Vision & Thesis

Q: What is your current thesis on how tokenized RWAs will evolve over the next 12 to 24 months, particularly in private credit and structured products?

A: The next 24 months belong to yield. Investors have now seen that tokenization works mechanically, the question has shifted from "can you do this" to "what return does it generate and how do I exit." Private credit is the immediate beneficiary because the spread between what institutional credit products return and what retail investors can currently access is enormous. Stablecoins also pay 0% interest, so tokenized treasuries was the first onchain yield product to find true market fit. Investors are now looking up the risk curve for more yielding RWA products. Structured products follow because programmable on-chain logic makes tranching, waterfall mechanics, and coupon distribution dramatically cheaper to administer. The platforms that will win are the ones with real yield products on licensed rails with a clear secondary liquidity path.

Q: As institutional interest grows but liquidity remains fragmented, what separates sustainable tokenized offerings from those that struggle to gain traction?

A: You need the whole package and an offering that is well thought through. Regulatory clarity and secondary liquidity is also mandatory. Just tokenizing to raise money has been a failed experiment. The tokenized asset versus the paper version, must be better, more use case, composable, more usable (think collateralization, lending, borrowing etc) and therefore more valuable than traditional paper securities offerings.

Market Structure & Personal Perspective

Q: How has your experience bridging institutional finance and digital asset markets influenced how you design compliant yet scalable issuance frameworks?

A: The challenge and goal, is bringing together the required rails and compliance from TradFi and marrying that with the speed and power of DeFi. This is what the whole industry needs to do as RWA is bringing web2 and web3 together. Previously you had CEX and DEX selling crypto and you had fintechs selling securities. The new format and underlying infra is blockchain. So now you need to bring the best of both worlds together and if you can do that, you will win.

Q: Looking ahead, what structural shift — regulation, distribution, or secondary liquidity — do you believe will be the key unlock for institutional adoption of tokenized RWAs?

A: Distribution, without question. Regulation is moving in the right direction across every major jurisdiction — Singapore, the US, Europe — and secondary liquidity is a solvable technical problem once the underlying product is properly structured. The missing unlock is B2B distribution at scale. The reason tokenized RWAs have not hit their potential is that its still early and securities are really complex. Institutions are adopting to save costs which translates into more profit and to find new distribution channels for their assets, which is happening now through DeFi connection and platforms like IXS that connect those dots.

Julian Kwan's vision for IXS underscores a fundamental truth: the future of finance is not just about putting assets on a blockchain, but about building the regulated, scalable distribution networks that allow them to move. By solving for both compliance and composability, IXS is paving the way for a world where institutional capital and decentralized efficiency coexist seamlessly. As the industry moves toward "yield" and "AI-driven deployment," the infrastructure Julian and his team have built over the last seven years stands ready to power the next generation of global capital markets.

To keep up with the latest insights on Real-World Assets (RWA) and the institutional exchange settlement layer, follow IXS Finance and Julian Kwan on their official channels.