USDR Issuer Tangible Plans to Redeem Itself as a Layer-2 for Real-World Assets

• Tangible has rebranded to re.al after its stablecoin, USDR, faltered last year.
• The rebranded layer-2 blockchain is expected to go live in two weeks.

Can one of the most notorious flops in the real world-assets (RWAs) sector turn itself into a bedrock for one of crypto’s hottest financial products? Tangible DAO is betting on it.

The U.K.-based project saw its stablecoin, USDR, falter in a liquidity crisis last year. Tangible is now setting its sights on two forms of redemption: first, a literal redemption of assets for holders of the sub-dollar stablecoin, and second, metaphorical redemption of the project itself through a pivot to becoming a platform for other RWAs to build on.

Now operating under a new name, the “re.al” layer-2 blockchain will seek to offer a "full stack" experience for issuing and trading tokenized real-world assets, said CEO Jag Singh. He told CoinDesk that the Arbitrum-based network plans to go live in two weeks.

Bullish projections envision the RWA market climbing past $10 trillion by the end of the decade. That may feel a bit off, given that the current total crypto market cap is one-fifth of that size.

However, if believers of permissionless trading have their way, massive pieces of financial infrastructure will inevitably pivot on-chain. Tokenized trading vehicles for popular “real world assets” like real estate, stocks and commodities would follow suit.

Where this trading takes place (if the migration takes shape at all) is an open-ended question. One likely home would be on networks like Arbitrum, Optimism and Polygon, so-called layer-2 networks that tie into the security of Ethereum but are faster and cheaper than the best-known smart contracts blockchain.

But Singh, who has been working on real-world assets in crypto since 2021, thinks it’s more likely that a "highly specialized" layer-2 will win out. He said re.al chose to build using Arbitrum because it offers native support for an array of gas tokens – the asset users pay with to execute their transactions.

The blockchain’s new governance token will pass revenue generated by projects building on re.al back to the token holders, he said.