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China’s Ant Digital Technologies, a unit of the Jack Ma-owned Ant Group, is tokenizing over $8 billion worth of energy infrastructure on its own blockchain network.
That’s according to a Bloomberg report that cited sources familiar with the matter as saying the unit is in the process of tokenizing 60 billion yuan ($8.4 billion) of power infrastructure on the AntChain network.
The report said Ant Digital Technologies has been monitoring the power output and outages for 15 million new energy devices in China, including solar panels and wind turbines, and uploading the data to its blockchain.
Ant Digital Technologies Plans To Issue Tokens For Energy Infrastructure
It has already raised around 300 million yuan ($42 million) to finance three clean energy projects. The unit now plans to issue tokens linked to those assets.
One of plans on the unit’s roadmap is to also offer tokens on offshore decentralized exchanges (DEXs) to create more liquidity for the assets.
That will be subject to regulatory approval, according to the anonymous sources cited in the report.
This is not the first move by the unit to tokenize energy assets. In August last year, Ant Digital Technologies raised $14 million for the energy firm Longshine Technology Group, and linked 9,000 of the company’s electric charging units to AntChain.
In December, the unit also secured more than $28 million for GCL Energy Technology by connecting photovoltaic assets to its blockchain.
RWA Sector Soars To Record High This Week
The move by Ant Digital Technologies to tokenize energy assets and potentially issue tokens for them is part of a growing trend of tokenizing real-world assets (RWAs).
The sector is still in its early stages, but is starting to gain momentum. Just this week, the value of tokenized RWAs soared to a record high of $28.4 billion, data from RWA.xyz shows. This is almost double the value seen at the beginning of the year.
RWA on-chain value (Source: RWA.xyz)
More than half of the digital RWA value is private credit that has been tokenized on the blockchain. Over a quarter of the value is also tokenized US Treasurys.
Other tokenized assets include commodities ($2 billion), institutional alternative funds ($1.8 billion), public equity ($421.2 million) and non-US government debt ($340.2 million).
The Ethereum blockchain remains the blockchain of choice for tokenized RWA issuers, and has a 57% share of the market.
Ant Group Looking To Get Into The Booming Stablecoin Space
Ant Group isn’t just involved in the energy infrastructure space, but is also reportedly looking to join the booming stablecoin market.
In July, a report said that the group plans to incorporate Circle’s USD Coin (USDC), which is the second-largest stablecoin by market cap, into its blockchain network.
Ant Group had also collaborated with ecommerce giant JD.com to lobby the People’s Bank of China (PBOC) to approve stablecoins backed by the Chinese Yuan.
That happened during the same month that US President Donald Trump signed the GENIUS Act into law, which is the first bill on the federal level that sets regulatory requirements for issuers in the US to comply with.
Some of those requirements include maintaining a 1:1 backing with the stablecoin’s underlying asset, as well as abiding by Anti-Money Laundering (AML) and Counter Terrorism laws.
Since the GENIUS Act was signed into law in July, the stablecoin market cap has climbed from $260.715 billion to a record high $286.231 billion, according to DeFiLlama data.
Stablecoin market cap (Source: DeFiLlama)
Similar to the RWA sector, Ethereum is the preferred blockchain for stablecoin issuers.
Stablecoin transaction volumes spike in August (Source: X)
In addition to energy asset tokenization and stablecoins, Ant Digital Technologies has also invested in a public blockchain called Pharos Network Technology. The project is led by a former Ant employee.
The unit has also entered into an agreement with a financial services firm based in Hong Kong called Yunfeng Financial Group. As part of the strategic cooperation agreement, the two will leverage Pharos’s platform to explore areas including RWA tokenization.
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