Multicoin: On-chain Real World Assets (RWA) will usher in the DeFi 2.0 era, with order books and request-for-quote (RFQ) models set to replace Automated Market Makers (AMMs) as the dominant mechanism.

Crypto venture firm Multicoin Capital’s co-head of venture investments, Spencer Applebaum, has published a lengthy article titled “DeFi 2.0”. In the piece, Applebaum notes that early DeFi primitives—automated market makers (AMMs), overcollateralized lending, variable-rate liquidity pools, and perpetual swaps—were designed for high-volatility crypto assets like Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH). However, real-world assets (RWAs) such as government bonds, stocks, and commodities have lower volatility, generate cash flows, and feature identifiable borrowers. Institutional players prioritize execution quality, tenure, and credit, so the same set of primitives cannot be rigidly applied to RWA use cases. Applebaum argues that DeFi 2.0 needs to add capabilities including order books or Request for Quote (RFQ) systems, fixed-rate and term lending, interest rate derivatives, options and structured products, repos and dark pools, portfolio margin, and revenue splitting. Tokenization is only the first step; value will accrue to public blockchain block space, core primitive fees, brokerage aggregation layers, and application order flow. As RWA scales, these primitives—“long-existing but ill-suited for the asset types”—will finally gain genuine market traction.