The tokenization of real-world assets is accelerating on two fronts: physical commodities like copper and institutional money market instruments on established blockchains. A partnership between Bridgetower Capital and Chainlink is digitizing an $11 billion Arizona copper mining project, while Ripple’s XRP Ledger is positioning itself as the settlement layer for a projected $18.9 trillion tokenized asset market by 2033.
Copper mining meets blockchain
The Bridgetower Capital–Chainlink initiative goes beyond tokenizing warehouse receipts; it aims to bring the entire mining asset on-chain, integrating production data, reserves, and operational metrics. Chainlink’s oracle network will supply verified off-chain data, enabling continuous auditing and near real-time pricing. This approach aligns with copper’s structural supply crunch – years of underinvestment and soaring demand from AI data centers, electrification, and grid expansion have turned the metal into a strategic resource. Billionaire investor Chamath Palihapitiya has called copper his “best trade idea for 2026,” warning that the market is underestimating the supply gap.
Financial infrastructure is being built by Ondo Finance, which provides tokenized U.S. Treasuries as programmable collateral, and ALCUM, a platform tying token value directly to copper production cycles rather than simple storage. The overall real-world asset tokenization market has reached $30 billion in distributed value, with nearly 750,000 holders globally, according to RWA.xyz.
Ripple targets settlement layer dominance
Meanwhile, Securitize has forecast a 100x growth for the tokenization industry, citing a joint study by Ripple and Boston Consulting Group that projects $18.9 trillion in digitized assets by 2033. Ripple is building the money layer on the XRP Ledger, which already hosts 302 active RWA projects and represents $3.69 billion in on-chain assets. Its institutional stablecoin, Ripple USD (RLUSD), has a market cap of $1.74 billion and monthly transfer volume of $14.31 billion. XRPL is being used to tokenize U.S. Treasury bonds – the Ondo Short-Term U.S. Government Bond Fund leads with $293.9 million – and to fractionalize premium Dubai real estate.
Ripple does not issue bonds or funds, but its RLUSD and XRPL network solve the critical pain point of instant settlement and clearing for trillion-dollar traditional finance flows. As tokenization expands, the convergence of physical resource markets and on-chain financial rails positions both copper-backed assets and the XRP ecosystem for significant growth.
