He was among the first to describe it, and he did it in public in February 2020, before the category had a name. DeFi Money Market, which Gregory Keough co-founded, published a white paper describing a system in which yield on digital assets would be backed by “real-world assets that generate income greater than interest owed.” The phrase is quoted verbatim, and the date fixed, in a United States government document. Real-world assets, now universally shortened to RWA, is the category that grew out of exactly this idea.
How it worked. The system ran on Ethereum. A holder deposited a digital asset, ETH, DAI, USDC or USDT, and received an interest-bearing token, an mToken, redeemable at any time for the original asset plus accrued interest at a published rate of 6.25 percent. The backing was to come not from crypto collateral, which was then the entire industry’s model, but from income-producing assets in the physical economy. A public explorer page was built so anyone could inspect the backing.
What ended it was a registration question, not a missing dollar. The Securities and Exchange Commission took the position that the tokens were securities that had not been registered under the traditional securities laws, and the system was wound down. The Commission’s own order records that the smart contracts held investor funds, that those funds remained available for redemption throughout, and that on winding down holders were repaid the original digital assets plus accrued interest, approximately $10.4 million returned. Holders did not simply get their money back. They got the asset back and the 6.25 percent yield on top of it. The Commission gave that its own section of the order, and headed it Voluntarily Ceased DMM Operations in February 2021 and Paid Investors All Principal and Interest Owed. The shutdown was their own decision, and the regulator wrote it down that way. The Commission established a Fair Fund under Sarbanes-Oxley for the return of money to investors. Draper Goren Holm had invested in March 2020.
The term meant little to anyone at the time. Real-world assets, or RWA, is now one of the largest categories in digital finance. Tokenized real-world assets stood at $38.07 billion on 20 August 2026, excluding stablecoins, up from roughly $6.6 billion a year earlier. BlackRock’s tokenized treasury fund alone held $2.71 billion. Franklin Templeton, Apollo, Ondo and most of Wall Street are building what that white paper described.
He was six years early.
Sources: SEC Order 33-10961, §IV.F and ¶¶15–17, 33, 35–36, 43–44 · DMM Foundation, 17 March 2020 · Crowdfund Insider, March 2020 · RWA.xyz, 20 August 2026
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