Abu Dhabi’s Mubadala Capital has launched a strategic collaboration with Kaio to evaluate on-chain Real-World Assets (RWAs), aiming to build a compliant blockchain infrastructure that could widen access to private-market investments. The initiative targets illiquid private assets and seeks to unlock secondary-market liquidity by applying tokenization alongside institutional-grade custody and compliance features.
Tokenized private markets with institutional controls
Mubadala Capital, the alternative-asset arm of Mubadala Investment Company, manages more than $30 billion within a parent group of $330 billion and operates from offices in Abu Dhabi, New York, London, San Francisco and Rio de Janeiro. The partnership with Kaio is framed as a deliberate, exploratory move to design infrastructure that would enable fractional, transferable exposure to private-equity and real-estate holdings for qualified investors while preserving institutional compliance.
Kaio — formerly Libre Capital — provides an end-to-end institutional tokenization framework that embeds compliance from asset origination through investor onboarding. The firm has deployed tokenization projects totalling over $200 million on infrastructure that uses the Hedera network, prioritising speed, finality and security as well as legal alignment, robust custody and hardened smart-contract engineering.
The partnership highlights three operational priorities: embedding regulatory controls into token standards; shortening settlement and administrative timelines through on-chain processes; and enabling secondary-market mechanics that could narrow premiums or discounts to net asset value. By focusing on programmable, tradable token structures, the collaboration aims to improve liquidity for traditionally illiquid private-market holdings and reduce operational frictions across the investment lifecycle.
The move aligns with broader UAE public policy to attract regulated digital-asset activity, citing frameworks such as Dubai’s ARVA and licensing regimes under VARA as part of an enabling environment. Institutionalisation of RWAs is presented as a shift from speculative crypto activity toward regulated, utility-driven applications that connect private-market inventory with compliant digital rails.
Market figures cited by the partners describe a rapidly expanding RWA opportunity set — from an estimated $65 billion valuation in Q1 2025 to projected ranges between $16 trillion and $30.1 trillion by 2030–2034 — and attribute roughly 60% of current adoption to institutional actors. These projections, alongside examples of large managers already surpassing $2.85 billion in tokenised assets under management, are used to frame the collaboration as timed to a structural inflection point for institutional tokenization.
The statement accompanying the partnership acknowledges persistent implementation risks, including legal uncertainty across jurisdictions, custody and reconciliation complexity, and smart-contract exposure. The technical and compliance architecture proposed by Kaio is positioned as a mitigation strategy rather than a panacea, underscoring that scaling RWAs will depend on ongoing legal, operational and cybersecurity risk management.
The Mubadala Capital–Kaio collaboration is a feasibility-driven step toward institutionalising tokenised private-market access. By marrying on-chain efficiencies with a compliance-first design, the initiative seeks to create a template for how qualified investors could gain programmable exposure to private equity and real estate within regulated digital-asset markets.