Why Confidential Transactions Are the Missing Piece for Real-World Asset Tokenization

“Every asset in the world will be tokenized.”

Those words, spoken by Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock, are now echoed across the global financial industry.
He’s right. Tokenization is not a trend, it’s an inevitability.

But there’s a truth the industry rarely says out loud:

Institutions will never adopt public blockchains if every transaction, balance, and position is fully visible to everyone.

Today, using a public blockchain is like sending your bank account information on a postcard.
It works, but everyone can read it.

At Old School AG, we wanted to change that.

The Institutional Barrier: Radical Transparency

Public blockchains were designed to be transparent. That’s great for decentralization, but catastrophic for privacy.

Your wallet balance is public
Every transfer you make is permanently visible
Your financial behavior can be analyzed, traced, and profiled
Competitors can monitor your positions
Counterparties can infer strategy
Regulators can see everything, but so can hackers

This level of exposure is incompatible with institutional finance, corporate treasury management, or real-world asset (RWA) issuance.

What happens when a company wants to tokenize equity?
When a fund wants to tokenized credit assets?
When a bank wants to settle tokenized treasuries?

They cannot do it on chains where the entire world can see their balance sheet.

This is the gap that must be closed if tokenization is ever going to scale.

The Fork in the Road

The industry has assumed there are only two choices:

Full transparency on public blockchains
Closed, permissioned, semi-blockchain systems

But permissioned chains defeat the point of open innovation.
And public chains make privacy impossible.

Larry Fink’s vision needs a third option:

A public blockchain with institutional-grade confidentiality.

And that’s exactly what we built in the ETHGlobal Hackathon in Buenos Aires.

Introducing ObscuRWA: Confidential Asset Tokenization on Oasis Sapphire

To prove what’s possible, we built ObscuRWA:
A fully confidential RWA-style token using the ERC-7943 standard deployed on Oasis Sapphire, the confidential EVM.

What makes Sapphire different?

Oasis Sapphire provides:

Encrypted smart-contract execution
Encrypted state
Encrypted calldata
Trusted Execution Environment (TEE)
Full Solidity compatibility

Every operation is private by default.

This is not a privacy add-on.
This is privacy built directly into the EVM.

Why ERC-7943?

ERC-7943 is a token standard specifically designed for Real World Assets:

compliance checks
transfer controls, and
enforcement actions

It behaves like an ERC-20 for developers, and allows complete confidentiality.

And what about users?

We integrated Privy, which gives users a fully embedded wallet experience:

Login with email or social
No seed phrase
No browser extension
Instant onboarding

It feels like a modern fintech app, not a crypto science experiment.

What We Achieved

With ObscuRWA running on Sapphire:

Users can hold a token without anyone seeing their balance
Transfers happen without revealing amounts
No position data is exposed
No counterparty information leaks
The transaction appears on-chain, but the details remain encrypted
Everything stays EVM-compatible and composable

This is confidential finance on a public blockchain.

Why This Matters for the Future of Tokenization

If we want real-world assets (equities, credit, fixed income, treasuries, commodities) to move on-chain, we need a system where:

✔ Institutions can settle without exposing strategy
✔ Corporations can tokenize assets without revealing their balance sheet
✔ Funds can operate privately while maintaining regulatory auditability
✔ Blockchains maintain openness and composability
✔ Privacy does not require permissioned infrastructure

Sapphire + ERC-7943 delivers exactly this blend.

It is the first realistic path toward Larry Fink’s vision, without compromising the principles of blockchain.

A Look at the Future

At Old School AG, we believe the next wave of blockchain adoption will be driven by:

Confidential RWAs
Private settlements
Corporate tokenization
On-Chain regulated markets
Sovereign digital assets
DeFi

Blockchain doesn’t win by exposing everything.
It wins when it protects what matters.

ObscuRWA is our first step toward that future.

Want to Learn More?

We will publish additional research and technical guides at oldschool.ag as we continue exploring confidential tokenization and on-chain compliant blockchain infrastructure.

If you'd like a deep dive, a workshop, or a consultation, feel free to reach out.