On February 11, during a panel discussion at the Consensus Hong Kong 2026 conference, several industry leaders explored the development trends of tokenized real-world assets (RWA). Participants included Evan Auyang, President of Animoca Brands Group; Christian Rau, Senior Vice President of Digital Assets and Blockchain at Mastercard; Nicola White, Vice President of Crypto at Robinhood; and Marcin Kazmierczak, Co-founder of Redstone Group, who moderated the discussion. During the discussion, the guests echoed the view of Rob Goldstein, Chief Operating Officer of BlackRock: digital ledgers are the most exciting innovation in finance since the advent of double-entry bookkeeping 700 years ago. Currently, RWAs are primarily targeted at institutional investors, with demand mainly focused on tokenized money market funds, U.S. Treasuries, stablecoin integration, and collateral optimization products, such as BlackRock’s BUIDL and Robinhood’s solutions, demonstrating the increasing practical value of this field.

The U.S. Department of Justice has announced that a key figure in a social engineering scam involving $263 million worth of Bitcoin has pleaded guilty. Evan Tangeman, a 22-year-old California resident, admitted in district court to participating in money laundering in violation of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO), involving more than $3.5 million. He is the ninth defendant to plead guilty in the case. The scam operated from October 2023 to May 2025, carried out by gang members distributed across various U.S. states and overseas. The group included hackers, organizers, target identifiers, telephone salespeople, and thieves who stole hardware wallets. Together, they stole approximately 4,100 Bitcoins, which were worth about $263 million at the time and are currently valued at around $371 million. The hackers breached websites to obtain cryptocurrency-related databases, target identifiers singled out high-value victims, and telephone salespeople induced victims to cooperate over the phone, making the entire scam operation highly sophisticated.