Abdul Rafay Gadit, Co-Founder and CCO of ZIGChain and Managing Partner at ZIGLabs, joins FinTech TV’s Raghda Ibraheem on Wall Street to MENA to unpack why the 16 trillion dollar tokenisation opportunity undersells the real number, and why most crypto projects fail at the parts of tokenisation that actually matter.
His reframe: tokenisation is a four sided problem covering origination, technology, regulation and distribution, not a technology problem alone, since the technology itself is already commoditised. What determines whether a project succeeds is where the asset and its yield originate, and where the asset gets distributed.
Gadit details ZIGChain’s partnership with Apex Group, a global fund administrator overseeing 3.4 trillion dollars in assets, and its work with Beehive, the DFSA regulated UAE SME funding platform, to bring private credit onto ZIGChain, giving UAE small businesses access to global capital on terms already available to SMEs in deeper credit markets. He also makes the case for Sharia-compliant finance as tokenisation’s largest underused opportunity, since Islamic finance already requires a real underlying asset with no synthetics or derivatives, a principle tokenisation enforces by design.
His closing claim: the widely cited 16 trillion dollar tokenisation figure, drawn from a 2022 BCG and ADDX projection for 2030, is conservative. Counting the broader fund management market, he puts the real opportunity closer to 100 trillion dollars, arguing that regulatory clarity paired with investor and institutional education, which he credits the UAE with building together, is what stands between today and that number.
ZIGChain is part of MENA Fintech Association’s network across 22 markets.
Topics discussed: real world asset tokenisation, the Apex Group and Beehive partnerships, Sharia-compliant finance on-chain, UAE SME access to global capital, regulatory clarity and investor education, the true size of the tokenisation opportunity.
Guest: Abdul Rafay Gadit, Co-Founder and CCO, ZIGChain; Managing Partner, ZIGLabs
Interviewer: Raghda Ibraheem, FinTech TV, Wall Street to MENA
