Building a new financial operating system for real world assets

Rayls

September 5, 2025

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min read

Building a new financial operating system for real world assets

A new financial primitive

The story of crypto is one of disruption. We have seen a decade of remarkable ingenuity, giving rise to new financial primitives: automated market makers, decentralized lending protocols, and sophisticated onchain derivatives. These are elegant creations, systems of pure code and mathematics. But for all their sophistication, they have a weakness. They are built on a narrow foundation, too small to support the true weight of the global financial system.¹ They are beautiful, but fragile. We in the crypto world have largely built a complex house on a narrow slice of capital markets, ignoring the most significant and oldest one: regulated debt.²

The vast oceans of institutional capital are, for all their complexity, simple in their core requirements. They must have regulatory certainty and a clear legal framework.¹ The onchain world, with its focus on anonymity and permissionless systems, has not been able to satisfy this need. It is a paradox. The technology promises to remake finance, but it has not yet built the one thing that finance fundamentally depends on.¹

This is the central problem that our partnership with Obligate sets out to solve. It is a strategic effort to build a compliant onchain capital market from the ground up, one designed to attract the world's largest pools of capital.¹ It is a blueprint for the future of institutional finance.

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The first principle of institutional capital

The world of institutional finance operates on a foundation of legal and regulatory certainty.¹ The financial system has been built over centuries to ensure that a promise to pay is legally enforceable and that transactions can be audited. Without this framework, there is no trust, and without trust, no capital will flow. Any system that hopes to attract institutional capital must first, and most importantly, satisfy this core requirement.

This is precisely where Obligate’s technology distinguishes itself.¹ Obligate provides the essential primitives that turn a mere digital token into a legally binding, regulated financial instrument. The platform integrates traditional financial identifiers like ISINs and adheres to critical compliance protocols such as Know Your Customer and Anti-Money Laundering.¹ This is the difference between a proof of concept and a real product.¹ Obligate's approach provides the mechanism to turn a financial instrument into a legitimately enforceable digital asset.³This is a fundamental piece of the puzzle that the rest of the onchain world has been overlooking. For example, Obligate recently completed a bond issuance for the publicly traded French company Metavisio without the involvement of traditional banking institutions, leveraging smart contracts on a blockchain.

The power of Obligate’s technology is that it solves the hardest problem for institutional onchain adoption. It addresses the lack of a regulated issuance platform and a legal framework for onchain debt. This is what makes the technology genuinely good. It provides the essential, foundational component that makes all subsequent onchain financial activity possible for regulated institutions.

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Rayls as the gravity well for institutional capital

If Obligate provides the essential content for this new financial system, we provide the infrastructure and distribution.¹ Rayls is a purpose built network for regulated institutional finance.⁴ Our architecture is a deliberate solution to the core problems faced by institutions looking to participate in the onchain world.

Rayls’ unique features create an environment that attracts and sustains institutional participation. First, our permissioned, private networks enable programmable compliance, meaning the network itself enforces regulatory rules.⁵ This represents a paradigm shift from traditional systems, where compliance is an afterthought or a manual process. Instead, the rules are embedded directly into the protocol.

Second, our use of Enygma powered zero knowledge technology provides critical privacy for financial transactions. This is a non negotiable for institutions that need to maintain confidentiality while operating on a shared ledger.⁴ Finally, we offer integrated stablecoin settlement and access to institutional DeFi liquidity, creating a compliant bridge between the worlds of traditional and decentralized finance.¹ Our network is already proving its value in the real world. We are in production with Núclea, Brazil's largest payment Financial Market Infrastructure, to issue and distribute digital assets, with over 10,000 assets issued each week and growing. Our privacy solution was also selected for the Central Bank of Brazil's "Drex" wholesale CBDC program and we have demonstrated a near real time cross border tokenized deposit and stablecoin settlement in collaboration with Mastercard for the G20 TechSprint.

The combination of these features creates a powerful network effect. The programmable compliance and privacy are not independent features. They work together to build a “gravity well” that attracts institutional capital. The more institutions that join our network and use its features, the more utility and liquidity the network gains, which in turn attracts even more participants. This positive feedback loop is what strengthens the Rayls ecosystem and encourages its expansion. It solves the distribution problem that Obligate would have if it operated in a silo.⁶

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The moment when two systems become a new one

The partnership between Rayls and Obligate is a tight integration.¹ Obligate issues regulated, tokenized debt natively on our private networks.¹ This is the key. The onchain bond, legally and technically sound, now lives in a compliant and private environment where it can be managed and distributed to a network of institutional participants.

A financial instrument, particularly a bond, has a full lifecycle, from issuance to coupon payments, redemptions, and corporate actions.¹ Obligate’s smart contracts automate this entire process, with all actions executed confidentially on Rayls.¹ The efficiency gains for this are profound. The partnership redefines the value proposition for each party and creates a new business model built on symbiosis. Obligate is the content creator for a new financial network, and we are the distribution channel with a built in audience.¹ This is a flywheel effect. Obligate creates the high quality, compliant real world asset content that gives the Rayls ecosystem utility, and we provide the network and infrastructure that gives Obligate’s content value.⁶

This partnership also enables a new kind of onchain liquidity. By allowing institutional investors to lend into Obligate listed assets through Rayls native DeFi vaults, the partnership creates a new type of DeFi.¹ This DeFi is compliant, yield generating, and composable, but also gated for the right participants.¹ It brings the efficiency of DeFi to institutional finance, without compromising on legal and regulatory needs.

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The blueprint for global expansion

We are an early mover, building the infrastructure that others may inevitably need to use to remain competitive. The possibilities for our network are a clear demonstration of this vision. For example, imagine a world where we could launch FX stablecoin settled bonds for exporters and invoice lenders in Latin America. This would be a template for solving real world currency and trade problems using compliant onchain debt.¹ Similarly, we have the potential to enable EuroC denominated private credit issuance with MiCA aligned controls in Europe. This shows a clear understanding of, and a deliberate design for, global regulatory frameworks.¹ Finally, the ability to allow top DeFi protocols to access tokenized debt via private, yield bearing RWA vaults is an opportunity to be a game changer for onchain yields and a clear path to bridging traditional and decentralized finance.¹

These are not trivial steps. They are a bet on the future. Much like the dot com era had its speculative frenzy before the serious companies like Amazon and Google emerged to build the long term infrastructure, the current market is full of noise.⁷ This partnership is a serious attempt to build the foundational infrastructure for the long term.

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The future is not built, it is enabled.

The partnership between Rayls and Obligate is a fundamental step that transforms Rayls from a technical platform into a functional financial operating system. Obligate provides the essential content in the form of regulated real world assets, and we provide the essential network to make them scalable, private, and compliant.¹

The tools are now in place. The groundwork has been laid. The first users are arriving. This is about the real, hard work of building the future of finance, piece by piece. The future is not far off. It is a direct result of the infrastructure we are building today.

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