SBI Group, one of Japans most prominent financial conglomerates with over $200 billion in total assets, and Chainlink announced a strategic partnership on Monday.

The collaboration is focused on “accelerating blockchain and digital asset adoption across global markets,” which broadly means expanding cross-chain real-world asset tokenization.

The pair will power use cases with Chainlink’s Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP) related to tokenized RWA, tokenized funds, and regulated stablecoins, with an initial focus on the Japanese market, it stated.

RWA Momentum Building

Chainlink’s SmartData will also be leveraged to bring net asset value data on-chain for tokenized funds, which helps to unlock liquidity and improve operational efficiency, it stated. Chainlink’s Proof of Reserve is also being used to provide transparent on-chain verifications of the reserves backing stablecoins.

“We have been building very advanced fund tokenization and stablecoin use cases with SBI for a while now, and I am excited to see our great work move towards a state of production usage at a large scale,” said Chainlink co-founder Sergey Nazarov.

We’re excited to announce a strategic partnership between Chainlink and SBI Group one of Japan’s largest financial conglomerates with the USD equivalent of over $200 billion in total assets.https://t.co/ZNyq7bVvUb

SBI Group and Chainlink will focus on powering several… pic.twitter.com/tdbLXOkUnW

Chainlink and SBI have previously worked together on an initiative for automated fund administration under the Monetary Authority of Singapore’s (MAS) Project Guardian.

The move follows an announcement last week from Ripple Labs that it was working with SBI to fuel its RLUSD stablecoin adoption in Japan.

RWA tokenization has hit an all-time high in terms of on-chain value, which is $26.5 billion according to RWA.xyz. However, this is a drop in the ocean compared to the multi-trillion-dollar traditional finance sector, which has yet to be brought on-chain.

Last week, Federal Reserve governor Christopher Waller revealed that the US central bank is actively conducting technical research on RWA tokenization and smart contracts.

LINK Price Outlook

Chainlink’s native token, LINK, has outperformed the wider crypto market recently, having surged more than 40% over the past month, primarily driven by RWA tokenization narratives.

LINK was trading flat on the day at just below $26 during the Monday morning Asian session. It has started to consolidate at this level, where it has been for a week or so following a big move up from below $16 earlier this month.

Nevertheless, LINK remains down over 50% from its peak more than four years ago, so there is plenty of room for upside in light of recent institutional partnerships and expansion.

$LINK is on the edge of changing the trend towards upwards against $BTC.

Made a higher low, and started to rally.

Whats the plan for this? Basically buy the dip and trade the trend upwards.

It looks great for the upcoming years. pic.twitter.com/vfQfE5Yzb1