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What's Behind the Parabolic Rise of BNB Chain? [Feat. BNB Chain] #CHAINREACTION
Recorded: March 27, 2026 Duration: 0:31:06Space Recording
Full Transcription
until Sunday, and then it goes back to 10am New York, daily savings time finally cashing up in
the UK. We've had a singular week. We've had lots of conversations we've never had on Chain Reaction
before, and we've been running for just over a year now, so we've done hundreds of episodes.
And I think today's going to be another one. It's obviously on the huge announcement we saw
yesterday from BNB Chain, which we're going to get into almost immediately.
But in my research of BNB Chain, to inform myself for this episode,
I realized there's a lot of very interesting narratives happening there.
So I'm thrilled to be joined by Nina Rong,
who is the Executive Director of Growth at BNB Chain.
Nina, how are you?
Good.
I'm great.
Very happy to be here.
And thank you for the invite, Robert.
And very excited to meet the Chain Reaction audience as well.
Yeah, it's my pleasure.
And we haven't done, we did a BNB episode last year at some point.
We haven't done one for a while.
And I realized, I was reading sort of Masari reports and bits and pieces.
And I realized that maybe I was a little bit out of the loop
because I hadn't realised just how many numbers had gone up.
You can get kind of phased in a bear market
where you're just looking at price and you see the red.
I mean, look behind me, look at that chart behind me.
It's horrible. It's just down and red and miserable.
And sometimes you get kind of blinded by that
and you forget to look at the
real adoption that's happening and yeah b chain kind of epitomizes that firstly let's get some
background on you you've been in the space for a while how did you end up here yeah so i joined
crypto in the time of defi summer and i have have always been the chain space. So I'm very
excited to be at Chain Reaction because I've been my entire career working on blockchain itself.
So prior to Bimby Chain, I was actually at Arbitron, which is the largest L2 network.
And then, yeah, I'm very excited to progress my career. And now I'm with B&B Chain and leading the growth BD marketing tech here.
Nice. Well, with no further ado, could you give us, rather than me do it,
could you give us what the big announcement yesterday was?
Yeah, absolutely.
So yesterday, Tazer announced that they will be bringing native Goat, R-W-WA, X-A-U-T, onto BNB Chain.
So that's very exciting for us.
Definitely, Goat is one of the most well-adopted RWA,
and BNB Chain is the second largest RWA chain just outside of Ethereum.
So we're happy to bring such a valuable and popular assets to our chain users.
And it's really such a pleasure to work with Tether as well.
Yeah, so we're certainly going to get on to RWA growth, particularly for BNB.
But first, on the Tether story, how has gold been?
gold bin tokenized gold is it's an interesting narrative what i always think of when i think of
Tokenized gold is an interesting narrative.
tokenized gold is um peter schiff because it's the only thing he's positive about in the entire
industry uh he he is a big fan of tokenized gold he recognizes the problems it solves we obviously saw a huge surge in gold price um in recent um months it's
been very volatile it's been volatile in the same sort of way crypto has been volatile um have you
seen as a result has tokenized gold seen much of an uptick in interest absolutely um In the past six months, we definitely see an aggressive growth in terms of gold interest.
And I can share a bit more about why gold became the most popular RWA.
Because essentially there are only two types of RWAs that crypto users actually have great interest in. The first one is the one that has
holding value. So it's either have very high APY or it's very safe like T-bills. Even though
APY is not really, really high, but it's almost risk-free. So there are assets that's worth
holding for the long term. So that's one type of asset that's worth to bring on chain to lower the barrier of interest.
And there's a second type of RWA that's the one that's worth trading, right?
It has great volatility.
And as you mentioned, there's a gold bull market right now.
So gold is actually not one of the few that actually fits in both categories.
It's worth for holding long term, but it's also worth for trading.
So we actually can engage both audiences with such an asset natively minted on BNP chain.
That's why we're so excited to work with Tether on this project.
Yeah, I mean, it makes sense.
It's funny, really.
It felt like gold was stagnant for so long.
I mean, you saw growth, but it felt minimal.
And then in the last year or so, it's just been crazy.
The volatility alone is, you know, a friend of mine, Freddie New,
compared what the UK government said, you know,
Bitcoin's too volatile for
us to take any interest in.
And then gold drops enough that it dropped more than Bitcoin's entire market cap in a
very short period.
So it just goes to show where it is now.
And there's obviously a huge demand for it.
We saw the queues to buy actual gold, which I don't remember ever seeing.
It may have happened 20 plus years ago.
So it's a really interesting narrative.
But RWAs as a whole are a very interesting narrative.
I think people got a little bit tired of it last year.
There was constant talk about real-world asset tokenization.
However, now we're seeing the real adoption of it. We're seeing massive
institutions knee-deep in RWAs, and we will come back to those. But one thing many people
may not know, and I hope you don't take offense to me saying that, but many people may not
know, the BNB chain is now second under RWA platforms by TVL.
It seems like a basic question,
but how did that happen?
Why did that happen?
I think it also really comes down to adoption of RWA.
So at this point,
I think the actual process
of tokenizing RWA
is relatively straightforward, right?
You have your custodian
and you have your auditor, you have somebody to develop a smart contract for you. So that part is
you know, it's almost very clear at this point. There are very mature service providers that
provide you such service. The reason that BNB chain is such a popular infrastructure for RWA
issuers is because we actually have the distribution.
And our team actually work at the front line alongside with RWE issuers to make sure
their access are presented in front of our 4 million daily active users. So at the end of
the day, RWE issuers brought their own chain with the hope to engage with the crypto audience that's usually outside
of the rich. So that's essentially something BNB chain prioritized and then became a great
advantage of ours and made our relationship and partnership with RWE share so smooth.
Yeah, it makes sense. So I want to flag something from my research, which I think highlights the sort of year BNB has had.
So there was a Mossari report on BNB chain at the end of 2025.
And I'll just read the excerpt.
RWA has exploded on BNB chain.
RWA's exploded on BNB chain. The real world asset sector grew 228.1% quarter over quarter
and 554.6% year over year to $2 billion, making BNB chain the second largest blockchain for
tokenized RWAs globally. Now, on top of that, you added a billion dollars in a single quarter.
You added a billion dollars in a single quarter.
I mean, it's crazy.
Those sort of numbers are crazy in a bear market.
It's just even more mind-blowing.
Why has it gone parabolic?
It feels, to people that aren't in RWAs all the time,
I know you are, but to people outside,
it feels like it's happened kind of all of a
sudden there's this flood of capital into it why is that right i think uh in the case of rweb most
of rwas um in b&b chain today is actually t-bill so it's almost a risk-free assets um so that
actually work in the bear market, right?
People are looking for safer options, a stable yield.
So that actually worked in current market condition.
And I think if you look at the percentage number, we grow really fast.
But that's also just because we started off the hardware effort last year, right?
So we started from a very small
basis. But at the end of the day, it's a lot of presenting ourselves in front of the traditional
finance, the Franklin Templeton, BlackRock, our partners. They probably didn't know us much before.
And last year was the year where we bridged the gap between crypto blockchain
infrastructure and our Tread5 partners. And once they understood that we have been around for
five, six years, we're so battle-tested, we have such a great community. It was very
straightforward for them to make the decision to issue billions of dollars of assets onto BNB chain.
So that was the initial work took a while.
But once we got acquainted, once we explained ourselves where we came from,
the partnership resulted or matured very quickly.
Yeah, BNB is an interesting one because it hasn't, I mean, the token,
is an interesting one because it hasn't, I mean, the token,
if my memory serves me, the token hasn't really behaved
like many altcoin tokens have.
And the chain has seen a lot of adoption,
even when we've been in these crypto winters
and we've seen retail basically exit in droves.
And look, this will sound a bit like a mean question,
but I don't mean it that way. When I think of what BNB had a lot of success in, in the past
two years, it would be meme coins. BNB were one of the leading platforms for them.
And in such a short period of time, you've gone from something rather unserious.
I'm pretty critical of meme coins.
Um, you've gone from something rather unserious to the pinnacle of TradFi.
You've landed BlackRock, Franklin Templeton, VanEck.
Like you've, you've attracted the biggest institutions.
Was there any tension there was that
was there a sort of um optics issue or did they just see because the tech is great no no one would
question that is that all they care about they didn't care about the other noise of what people
were using the tech for they just saw that the tech was good and and so it was an easy bridge to build do you know what i mean yeah absolutely um so i i used to have the same question same concern right if i we
we have a lot we obviously have a lot of retail audiences but would institution actually acknowledge
our retail audiences are they interested in our retail audiences so So I think meme is an asset type that we need to give credits to
as part of the industry. Whether you like it or not like it, we have to acknowledge that there
are a big crypto audience that enjoy trading meme tokens. And as an underlying infrastructure, we
support that part of the industry.
And RWA is completely on the other side of the spectrum.
However, the crypto industry is so small.
If you look at the TrasFi capital size and the size of the crypto market,
Memecoin is a very, very small part of this crypto market even.
So for them, they understand Memecoin exists,
but it's not something that's big enough for them to completely shut down an infrastructure partner
completely. And on the other side, as I mentioned, they are here to reach retail audiences.
And it's actually of their interest
to reach a blockchain that has such an active user base.
We have about 4 million active address every month,
sorry, every week.
And right now we're almost sitting
at 800 million unique wallets in the blockchain.
So it's a massive user base.
And not all of them are here on day one them are here on day one for RWA. They're probably here for NFTs, for meme coins.
But at some point they will get access to RWA's tokenized stock. And that's just a way for them to get acquainted into the crypto industry.
And we want to make sure that channel is open and
clear for them to get their foot in the door first. Yeah, I like that answer. As I say,
it seems like a bit of a mean question. I don't mean it to be mean. It's just,
I worry that a lot of the industry, and it's certainly not limited to BNB, a lot of the industry has to shake some of the less flattering stories
that have done the rounds, particularly with mainstream media.
And TradFi represents, they've got a foot in both camps.
And I think some TradFi organisations and institutions
have been a little bit reticent to engage with some areas of blockchain
because of that.
There's one thing you said there that I think is really interesting to get onto, which is
your user base. Now, I saw, I think this number is correct, I saw BNB chain has 41,000 plus RWA
holders. Now, I have two questions about this, or maybe three. So the first question is, is that a low or high number? I have no point of reference, really. And you said there was, I think, 4 million unique active wallets weekly, or thereabouts, which means RWA holders represent, what, 1%, perhaps, of unique active wallets.
I don't, you know, those numbers may not exactly line up, but is that a big number in the grand
scheme of things? It's quite hard to tell. Let me actually just pull up the RWA or XYZ and see if we can get a number there in terms of holders.
Yeah, that's a good idea.
I think I had to open in one of my tabs as well.
Because it does seem like a lot.
But then I guess I don't know what the other change is.
So that's about, in terms of holders, that's about number three, number four on the list.
Yeah.
And the reason that we were able to get so many holders on RWA is because about 80% of the on-do tokenized stock trading volume actually happened on BNB chain.
tokenized stock trading volume actually happened on BNB chain.
So that also goes back to the characteristic of our BNB chain audiences, right? We are here to
serve the trader community. So trading of RWA is actually one of the strategic areas that we focus
on. We want to ensure that there are,
RWA's are not just there sitting in people's wallet,
but rather they are circulating in our ecosystem.
Yeah, that's interesting.
You may not have the answer to this.
I don't expect you to, but I'm curious.
Do you have any sense of what the breakdown
of that 41,000 plus RWA holders is?
Is it retail or is it institutions?
Do you have any idea?
I think a lot of them are for the owned tokenized stock traders.
So I would guess it's a fair number of retail traders on that list.
Yeah, that's interesting. Okay, I think I want to talk about RWAs broadly, because it's an area that I haven't maybe dived into for a while,
and the makeup of it might have shifted slightly. What assets are doing particularly well with RWAs?
Obviously, we mentioned gold um is there anything
else the the one i the only one i've really talked about at length was equities um we've had a few
people on to discuss that um yeah what sort of assets are doing well tokenized stock is doing
well in terms of like the um trading volume uh people have interest to trade, especially the people outside of the US,
because traditionally it's very hard for them to access such an opportunity. So that's definitely
one. Another one is, I think the entire RWA sector, we're all working towards bringing more use case for RWAs. And the big topic of this is
collateralization. So we want to allow RWA to be collateralized and on the other end to borrow
stablecoins against it. So one hurdle here though is a lot of the RWA securities,
though, is a lot of the RWA securities, they are only allowed to be deposited with a KYC
whitelisted address. So that becomes a blocker because if you deposit into a smart contract,
then a smart contract does not have a KYC. So that's essentially where things are a bit slow.
that's essentially where things are a bit slow. But for a lot of the tokenized TBLs, if that's
possible, if we can get around that, I think the adoption will be a lot higher because then people
can actually, besides holding RWA, they increase their capital efficiency. They can do other things
outside of just holding it. That would be very useful and very attractive for many institutional investors.
Yeah. Do you think that's something we will resolve in this year?
And how do we get past that?
Because it seems like a very difficult problem when you've got the big institutions involved.
They're obviously going to be hot on KYC and stuff.
How do we solve that problem?
Yeah, absolutely. hot on on KYC and stuff how do we how do we solve that problem? Yeah absolutely so there are already
projects for example Plume has a wrapped version of permissioned RWA so they wrap it and make it permissionless and so also another way is for big institutions especially if they hold say
is for big institutions, especially if they hold, say, eight figures of RWA and they want
to borrow against it, a typical lending market typically do not have such a liquidity to
lend to them, right?
There needs to be some effort to get liquidity only from the supplier side.
So a lot of lending protocols, especially in B&B chain, are working directly with such
institutions and they handle this off-chain.
And the interesting part of this, for an institution, they do not require you to deposit your RWA into a smart contract address.
Instead, they can allow you to deposit into a centralized custodian.
And the centralized custodian can provide the evidence that they
actually hold such amount of assets. Thus, the lending market on the other side are confident to
lend stablecoins against those evidence. So that's another way to get it wrong,
because then if it's with a custodian, then the custodian can be KYC, or the supplier can actually have an account
that's KYC with a custodian and have that account under their name.
So that's also another way that we can get around this.
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
I think connected to this, my next line of inquiry would be the regulatory environment.
This has been a huge topic, and I've spoken about it a lot this week.
We've seen with the SEC and CFTC guidance
on what is and isn't security,
we've seen companies flooding back to the US
after a long time away from it.
How important is the regulatory environment
to RWA as an entire sector of our industry?
I think it's definitely very important.
And we definitely work very closely with our institution partners.
And we're here to serve our partners.
And we're also here to work with them to understand what's the next step of the RWA vertical.
Outside of the regulatory, so these are
specifically for securities, but there are some types of RWAs that's more niche. For example,
Pokemon card, right, sports card, that's also another type of RWA that's very has been very popular especially with the trader community as well. So we have the very serious partners in a very compliant regulatory focus.
We also have the ones that's more retail focused that at this stage do not have any regulatory
that concerns them.
So yeah so we will work with a range of partners and then we want to make sure our technology is available to all.
I love the retail examples. I think they make I don't have a background in TradFi.
So I think the ones that easily resonate with me are the retail examples.
And I remember I've told this on the show before, but a couple of years ago, I was waffling on about why we should be using RWA for watches.
I'm a big watch guy and I've worked in the industry as well.
And there's a huge problem with fakes where the fakes are so good that you can't authenticate them unless you have an actual expert in that specific brand.
And they have to take the watch apart and really look. It's crazy the level it's got to. And the way that the watch
market has always dealt with it is they'll say, oh, have you got box and papers? Like a bit of
cardboard and paper isn't the easiest thing to fake in the entire world. It's way easier than
the watch. And one thing, one way of doing it is by tokenization, you get that sort of stamp of
authenticity because the person that bought the watch would also have the accompanying token.
So that was always a really interesting use case to me.
Pokemon cards also makes a lot of sense.
And I also think it adds a lot of liquidity to markets that are probably really illiquid.
I mean, selling a Pokemon card can't be that easy.
You tend to see it done at
auctions so it must be quite hard to trade are there any other sort of assets that you
are hoping to see or that you think would would fit nicely into rwa landscape
uh i do not have any on top of my mind, but going back to your point of the retail focused RWA,
I think as a whole, we all have to do better in terms of the UX of trading and giving people access of RWAs.
So I've talked to a lot of luxury brands, even back when NFT was big.
I've been in touch with them about using blockchain as a form of authentication of their authenticity.
But it's just the UX was so complicated for their everyday audience.
And that really never took off.
So I think really the UX is one of the things that we all need to improve.
And hopefully with regulatory clarity, we can work on that as the next big challenge that we all collectively overcome as an industry.
It feels like UX has been the problem for like eight years.
It feels like UX has been the problem for like eight years.
Like it's whatever area we start working in, it feels like UX is the problem.
And I had Eli Ben-Sasson, who's the co-author of Zero Knowledge Proof.
So I had him on the show and I said, when it comes to privacy in crypto, what's the biggest blocker?
What's the biggest problem we have to solve?
And he said UX.
And then earlier this week, I can't remember who we had on.
I can't remember which guest it was.
But one of the guests, I said, you know, what's the biggest blocker for your area?
It might have been fan tokens.
It might have been Alex Dreyfus of Associus.
And he said, oh, UX is, you know, UX is the biggest problem.
So it feels like all roads lead to UX as a problem.
But I'm not sure that necessarily everybody understands
what exactly that means.
So with RWAs and UX as a barrier,
is it because there are too many steps
or is it because it's too complicated with addresses?
And what's the problem, like simply put?
There are a few ways.
The first one is around the KYC part, right?
That itself is a very, it's a multi-step process
and you have to wait for several days
for your address to be whitelisted.
In certain, if it's a permission order,
you actually cannot send it freely to anybody,
right? So that itself, it's not a great UX. And then it comes to distributions. People,
I think if we interview 10 crypto users, where can you buy Franklin Templeton money markets today?
I don't know if they can give you a very direct answer at this point.
The distribution is relatively difficult as well. So I think that that's the twofold,
right? Essentially comes down to how easy it is for people to find RWAs and how easy it is for them
to get their hands on those assets. Yeah yeah that makes sense i even i can't
name very many so that's probably that's probably true um okay look we're sort of heading towards
the end of the show and i want to look forward because we've seen i mean we've seen that crazy
growth i'm looking at the stat again the 5544% year over year, and then $1 billion in a
quarter. You're obviously pretty excited for the rest of the year because it's going so well.
What do you expect to see in 2026? I would expect to see RWA to continue growing. I expect to see a lot more use cases for RWA, just as I mentioned, the
collateralization part, the permissionless wrapper for permissioned RWAs, trading-related
activities, especially stock trading IPO and pre-IPO equities. Those are very big. And
this year, B-Chain actually has a lot planned in the US. We just finished
Digital Asset Summit in New York. We're going to come back in Miami for consensus. So definitely
this year, it's a year where BIMB chain wants to continue our conversation with our
tradified institutions and our US user bases. So yeah, very exciting year ahead.
and our US user basis.
So yeah, very exciting year ahead.
Is that, just to tackle a little question on the end,
is that the sort of pushback into the US,
is that around the sort of the regulatory landscape
and the shift under the Trump administration
where it's now more crypto friendly?
Has that kind of opened the door for you
to start working in the US more aggressively?
I do not. I don't think that was too big of a consideration for us.
And obviously, if President Trump continues to support the crypto market, I think in general it benefits the entire industry.
For us, we really just saw the amount of US-based audiences that entered BNP chain,
especially through the RWA wave through our collaboration with Franklin Templin, BlackRock, and Vanag.
We wanted to have a closer relationship, a communication with them.
So that was the primary motivation for us to come back into the US.
And we actually have team members here this year.
So, yeah, very excited to be here a lot more often.
Yeah, absolutely.
Are you there now?
Are you in the U.S. right now?
Yes, we are here at the Pennsylvania Blockchain Week.
We just finished DAS in New York.
And we're actually in the U.S. roadshow right now.
So next we're going to go to Boston for a workshop with students at MIT at Harvard we're also going
to be going to Berkeley and Stanford to meet the developer and students there so we have a whole
roadshow planned for the U.S. Wow yeah you really are on tour okay well I mean we might see you in
Miami and yeah hopefully we get to have a conversation in person, because it is fascinating to see where you guys are headed. Yeah, that's, that was a fantastic conversation. And certainly something we haven't really spoken about on the show for a while. Hopefully, that's given our audience some insight into, you know, what what's really set light in in BNB as an ecosystem.
Nina, thank you so much for joining us.
I appreciate you taking the time.
Awesome.
Thank you, Robbald.
Thank you for having me.
You're most welcome.
Okay, well, that is it for another episode of Chain Reaction,
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Have a great weekend and we will see you the same time again Monday.
