Inside Chintai’s RWA Business Model
Transforming Traditional Capital Markets
Chintai brings Real World Assets to life . . . for everyone.
Let that sink in.
The vast majority of investors in traditional capital markets only have access to assets once they go public through an IPO, but this is exactly when all the real value has already been extracted. The best way to make big gains — with corresponding higher risk — is to invest earlier in the private rounds, but how?
It isn’t worth the time or effort for startups to take investor money if it doesn’t push their funding round forward significantly. New investor on-boarding is costly, involving expensive compliance, operational and general account management overhead, so minimum investment thresholds are set high to limit investor headcount. Unless an investor can sink at least $100K into an investment they can forget about it. Further, most private investment rounds have even higher minimum investment requirements. The status quo finds only rich investors are given the opportunity to make serious profit from investing.
What stops fundraisers from allowing smaller investors to take part? There are three big ticket items preventing access today:
This overhead adds up and does not scale well, explaining why the fewer investors fundraisers have to deal with, the better.
The small set of wealthy investors that fundraisers have to deal with makes the market illiquid, which makes price discovery difficult. This situation typically leads to a bad deal for the fundraiser. These few high net worth investors usually dictate terms: “I’m only willing to pay X for your assets, take it or leave it.” Most fundraisers are forced to take it.
This is where Real World Asset (RWA) tokenization comes into focus. Blockchain technology enables lower-cost vertical integration and seamless running of private financial markets. The on-boarding cost per investor is negligible, so fundraisers are incentivized to open the market to everyone.
The ability of RWA blockchain platforms to economically support large numbers of investors primarily helps with price discovery, as massive numbers of investors compete with each other to determine market pricing. At last, fundraisers receive a fair appraisal of their assets, and all investors are finally allowed a chance to own assets early on, investments that can 10x or more. Investors also benefit from on-chain exchanges with Automated Market Making (AMM) that offer fast market price formation and increased liquidity.
The only losers are a comparatively tiny group of high net worth (HNW) investors that have preyed upon on an outdated financial system far too long . . . but do they really lose? There is a silver-lining for HNW investors: Instead of the usual seven-year wait, they benefit from a much-desired early investment exit to search for their next investment opportunity. By including retail investors in the mix everything accelerates, price discovery, market liquidity establishment, reaching profitability — a rare win-win outcome.
Chintai is leading the charge with its regulated RWA tokenization platform, with licensing for security and non-security issuance and trading.
Chintai is poised to democratize access to private finance.
Chintai’s Business Model
Unlike some of its competitors in the RWA space, Chintai is not selling a software package to financial institutions (FI). Such models typically do not scale with the amount of business the FI produces, with annual subscription charges between $50K and $1M depending on the size of each FI. There’s one critical flaw in a software package subscription model: All the real money is being made by each FI, not the software package provider; each FI actually resells the package further on to actual asset issuers, making tremendous profits in the process.
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Because Chintai holds two licenses granted by Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to issue and trade RWA, Chintai itself acts as the FI. This means Chintai’s regulated business model can make much more scalable revenue streams compared to a software package subscription model. Moreover, competitors selling packages can only sell their product to FIs, whereas Chintai can offer its regulated issuance and trading services to anyone who wants to raise capital. Simply put, Chintai’s model captures much more revenue with a much larger potential issuer base.
Another major advantage in Chintai’s model is its focus on compliance and regulation. RWA competitors using the software package model usually have no licensing in place; the FIs who buy their package must do all the costly compliance themselves. Compliance processing is a heavy lift that drives the price up for end-issuers. Because the core of Chintai’s model relies on rule-based automated compliance (called Sentinel), Chintai saves a ton of time and effort when verifying financial records and ensuring every transaction on the platform is up to scratch. In this way, Chintai saves between 30% and 70% in compliance costs, savings that are passed along to the end-issuer. Chintai’s business model is designed to maximize every competitive advantage.
Finally, for RWA competitors relying on public blockchains, issuers should carefully consider the physical infrastructure they are obligated to use, weighing advantages and disadvantages. The first question issuers should ask is “Why is the entire platform running on a public blockchain?” If the answer is for audit trail purposes, that is not a proper answer because it doesn’t matter whether auditing is written from a private or public chain; we have already established that most package business models do not have any responsibility handling compliance or auditing, so most competitors are actually using public blockchains for liquidity, essentially tapping into a new source of potential investors.
These public chain competitors need to launch on a very liquid blockchain like Ethereum, but still must ensure (because FIs will insist on it) only KYC’d investors can access RWA tokens. Therefore, another rabbit hole appears, entailing a set of smart contracts to associate KYC’d investor addresses on Ethereum with whitelist access to specific RWA tokens minted on-chain. In doing so a major flaw is encountered: Doing this association instantly cuts liquidity down to zero on day-one. What to do? Coming full circle, competitors using a public chain model now have to onboard users the same way as a private blockchain model — with substantial additional work to deal with all the terrible user-experience (UX) hurdles inherent with public blockchains.
That is a hard sell.
Compared to other models involving software subscription, unlicensed entities and public blockchains, Chintai’s one-stop regulated model offers issuers a much better deal, both in terms of lower cost and greater convenience, even in cases where Chintai is optionally working with another FI. In nearly every issuance case, Chintai’s model receives a significantly bigger piece of the issuance pie. In the end, the Chintai business model makes the entire issuance process a better experience for everyone involved.
That is a much easier sell.
No Equal In Sight
Thanks to its carefully designed regulated business model, using Chintai’s RWA platform to launch new assets is a no-brainer:
Chintai’s vertical integration means its platform is cheaper and easier to use than prior bloated solutions used by traditional financial institutions. The business model drove platform design and resulted in the most comprehensive, convenient and cost-effective blockchain platform for issuing and trading RWA.
Chintai’s business model is influenced by MAS regulations to legally service the entire projected $16T RWA market by 2030. The platform provides institutional clients around the globe a one-stop solution for RWA tokenization, issuance, trading and custody in the most secure and compliant manner possible, with automated Sentinel compliance monitoring every transaction in real-time.
The business model is driven by real-world requirements from large institutional collaborators. Requirements that ensure any asset class can be tokenized and subsequently traded, including equities, bonds, real-estate and carbon credits, just to name a few (think: Coinbase). Institutional clients can optionally stand-up their own branded websites for customer onboarding, dynamic issuance and trading using Chintai’s extensive white label services (think: Shopify). After nearly four-years of iterative design and development the platform ensures a wide range of assets are brought to market faster at scale than any other approach.
For investors, Chintai’s business model emphasizes the importance of a low-friction user experience (#UX) to easily evaluate, trade RWA and maintain RWA investment portfolios on-chain. Perhaps most importantly, Chintai’s business model democratizes access to RWA by emphasizing asset fractionalization, enabling illiquid assets to appear in retail investor portfolios, assets difficult or impossible to acquire in traditional markets.
The Chintai business model unleashed a RWA platform that has no equal — not for years to come.