The RWA Ledger
Founded By A Former TradFi Leader, Written For Leaders Who Didn’t Crypto Then, But Need To Understand It Now.
The RWA Ledger Founded By A Former TradFi Leader, Written For Leaders Who Didn’t Crypto Then, But Need To Understand It Now.
About this publication
There are two kinds of financial media right now. Crypto native coverage written for people already in the ecosystem, and traditional finance coverage that treats blockchain like something to revisit in a couple of years when it’s more “mature.” If you’ve spent any time in institutional finance and felt like neither of those was written for you, that’s exactly why this exists.
Who’s behind this
I’m Marina Mendenhall-Valente. I spent over a decade in product, program, and portfolio management inside some of the more conservative corners of traditional financial services, Wells Fargo, First Republic Bank, and AssetMark. The firms I worked at weren’t touching crypto, and I understood exactly why. Highly regulated environments breed a particular kind of caution, and that caution isn’t irrational. I respected it even when I didn’t share it.
Because I always believed the technology was coming. I just knew it was going to be a long road.
What I was waiting for was regulation. Not because regulation makes things safe, but because in the world I worked in, it’s what makes things possible. When it started to move, I knew this space was about to become very relevant to the industry I’d spent my career inside.
When First Republic failed, I watched it happen from the inside. It clarified something I’d already been thinking: the infrastructure underlying institutional finance is more fragile, more opaque, and more overdue for a rethink than most people working inside it are willing to say out loud. After my layoff from AssetMark, I made a decision. Going back into corporate wasn’t the move. I wanted to do something more useful, which was help people like the ones I used to sit across from in meetings, TradFi leaders trying to figure out what tokenization actually means for the industry they’ve spent their careers in. That’s what The RWA Ledger is.
What keeps me focused on this space goes beyond markets and infrastructure. A world where jurisdiction isn’t a barrier to participation, where settlement is instantaneous for people who actually need their money to move, and where financial records are verifiable rather than buried in spreadsheets and paper files, that matters. Tokenization of real world assets has the potential to solve for problems legacy systems were never designed to handle. We’re early, but the direction is right.
I’m also Founding Treasurer of the Association for Women in Cryptocurrency (AWIC), San Francisco Chapter. AWIC exists to make this space more accessible and understandable, for women and the allies who support them. That means cutting through the noise, creating room for people to ask real questions, and building a community where finance and crypto professionals can navigate this transition together. If that resonates with you, I’d love to connect.
What you’ll find here
The publication is focused on tokenization and the evolution of financial infrastructure, with attention to the parts that are hardest to get right: custody, settlement, clearing workflows, regulatory frameworks, and the operational realities that determine whether something actually gets adopted. I also spend a lot of time working directly with founders building in this space. What I’ve found is that the challenges they’re navigating, around integration, data, KYC/AML, interoperability, and institutional credibility, aren’t all that different from the ones I dealt with in TradFi. The problems have the same shape. The context is just new. That’s the thread that runs through most of what I write.
Who reads this
The readership is blended, and I think that reflects where the industry actually is right now. Some readers are finance professionals who are watching tokenization move from the fringe to the regulatory agenda and want analysis grounded in how markets actually work. Some are builders and founders trying to understand what it takes to be taken seriously by institutional players. Some are in compliance with policy and need a practitioner’s read on how these systems are developing. If you care about where financial infrastructure is going and want to understand it without the noise, you’re in the right place.
Why subscribe
I’m not a quant, a JD, or a CFA. What I am is someone who spent a decade in the room with all of them, inside institutions where regulators, auditors, and executive stakeholders all had a seat at the table. I studied economics, I’ve lived inside market structure, and I’ve spent my career translating between the people who build financial systems and the people who govern and operate them. If you want someone who can read a tokenization whitepaper, a custody framework, and a regulatory comment letter and tell you what they mean in relation to each other and to the market, that’s what you’ll find here. No credentials theater, no hype. Just clear analysis from someone who knows how this industry actually operates.
Marina Mendenhall-Valente is Founder & Principal of The RWA Ledger and Founding Treasurer of the Association for Women in Cryptocurrency (AWIC), San Francisco Chapter.
