Jovay in-depth analysis: How Ant Financial detonated the global RWA market with L2

In the 17th century, the British East India Company crossed the ocean and established the world's first joint-stock commercial empire. At that time, the friction of ocean shipping, cargo insurance, and local currency exchange was extremely high. Enterprises used joint-stock company systems, voyage insurance, double-entry bookkeeping, etc. to coordinate resources internally, laying the foundation for the embryonic form of capitalist globalization. In 1937, economist Ronald Coase proposed the "transaction cost" theory: when the market mechanism is inefficient in completing negotiations and fulfilling contracts, corporate organizations will replace the market to improve resource allocation efficiency. This theory has become the core of understanding the evolution of modern companies and even technological changes. Today, blockchain is redefining the transaction cost structure by technical means. Real asset tokenization (RWA) significantly reduces trust costs and circulation friction by converting traditional assets such as land, energy facilities, and carbon emission rights into digital tokens that can be split and settled on the chain. At the end of 2024, the 200 million yuan RWA token issued by GCL Energy based on the 82MW photovoltaic power station marked a major breakthrough in the digitization of China's green assets and also foreshadowed a shift in the logic of global asset allocation. In this historical change, Ant Group, based on its deep experience in alliance chains, launched the first permissionless high-performance public chain, Jovay , taking a key step towards the digitization of global infrastructure and real assets. This article will systematically analyze Jovay's strategic positioning, market path, technical architecture, ecological construction, development planning, security mechanism, etc., to provide a complete perspective for the industry.

1. New anchor point under index turbulence: RWA's capital attraction

As global economic volatility intensifies, investors' risk aversion has increased significantly. The MSCI Minimum Volatility Index shows that the average monthly excess return of low-volatility assets in the first quarter of 2025 reached 0.25%, and the market is enthusiastic about "risk-hedgeable" assets. At the same time, 30-day volatility is close to the peak of the epidemic in 2020. Although traditional tools such as gold and US bonds respond quickly, they are difficult to resist structural risks. Against this background, RWA has become a new anchor for capital pursuit. The BCG and ADDX report predicts that by 2030, the global asset tokenization market will reach 16 trillion US dollars, accounting for about 10% of global GDP; optimistic estimates even suggest that it will reach 23 trillion US dollars in 2033. Why does RWA attract so much attention? Its value lies in:

• It has the dual advantages of “anti-volatility of physical assets” and “real-time transactions on the chain”.
• Release asset liquidity through tokenization and enhance capital utilization efficiency.
• Goldman Sachs' GS DAP platform has shortened the settlement period for $12 billion in bonds from 14 days to 48 hours, increasing efficiency by more than 60%.

In addition, the expansion of ESG investment has also accelerated the tokenization of green assets. Global ESG investment has exceeded 30 trillion US dollars in 2024 and is expected to reach 167 trillion by 2034. RWA is injecting on-chain transparency and trading liquidity into green bonds, carbon assets, clean energy, etc. RWA can:

• Reduce asset drawdown risk and enhance risk hedging capabilities;
• Realize all-weather on-chain transactions and second-level settlement;
• Provide verifiable data foundation and smart contract governance to reduce information asymmetry.

RWA is becoming one of the best solutions to support structural risk hedging in turbulent markets.

1. Jovay: Global RWA infrastructure driven by Layer2

2.1 Strategic Positioning: From Alliance Chain to Global Public Chain

Blockchain technology can be said to run through the entire development process of Ant Digital. As early as 2015, Ant established a blockchain laboratory to start technology exploration. After years of precipitation, Ant Digital has not only completed the comprehensive accumulation of underlying technologies, but also took the lead in commercialization in multiple scenarios. In the summer of 2023, Ant Digital officially launched the RWA technology solution for the new energy industry, marking a key step in the field of chain-to-physical assets. RWA refers to the digitization and standardization of physical assets with the help of blockchain to achieve their trusted transactions worldwide. With the support of the "sandbox" mechanism of the Hong Kong Monetary Authority, Ant Digital has assisted three companies in completing the implementation of RWA projects, covering green asset types such as charging piles, photovoltaic equipment and two-wheel battery replacement facilities, and successfully opened up a complete closed loop of "physical assets-on-chain confirmation-token financing". The RWA track then quickly heated up, and institutions such as China Asset Management and JD.com also joined the game. The logic behind this, on the one hand, stems from the continuous expansion of the amount of funds in the Web3 ecosystem, and on the other hand, the problem of "idle capital" within Web3 is becoming increasingly prominent - it is urgent to introduce real assets with real value into the chain to support the intrinsic value foundation of Web3. On the one hand, there is money, and on the other hand, there is asset demand. As long as the credibility of physical assets and the security of data rights are guaranteed, the digital circulation of physical assets can be realized. Among them, the most important is the underlying blockchain technology, which is the core technical support for the large-scale implementation of RWA. In October 2023, Ant Digital Technology disclosed for the first time its "two chains and one bridge" platform architecture specially built for RWA; on April 30, 2024, it launched Jovay, a high-performance Layer2 blockchain focusing on RWA transactions for overseas markets. This means that RWA has entered the era of "millisecond-level trusted transactions", and the global liquidity of on-chain assets is being fundamentally reshaped. Jovay's strategic positioning is highly coordinated with Ant Digital Technology's "dual headquarters" architecture:

• Hong Kong serves as a hub for connecting domestic and overseas financial assets;
• Dubai serves as a global RWA innovation hub and regulatory practice testing ground.

Jovay mainly serves financial institutions, green energy companies, cross-border investment and financing platforms, RWA project parties and Web3 developers. The market target focuses on mainstream RWA categories such as global new energy assets, green bonds, carbon assets and supply chain finance, and takes into account the regulatory needs and innovation ecology in Asia Pacific, the Middle East and other regions. Its commercial compliance path refers to the "VIE+data cross-border reporting" model: asset data retention is achieved within the country, and on-chain compliance transactions are conducted overseas. Jovay has become a core part of Ant Digital's global RWA strategy, and together with the alliance chain and the trusted cross-chain bridge, it has built an infrastructure system of "two chains and one bridge". It is reported that as of now, Ant Digital has "moved" 14 million new energy devices onto the blockchain, forming the world's largest new energy on-chain asset platform, which maps and links the green energy of the physical world in real time, laying the foundation for energy asset RWA.

2.2 Technical Architecture: Millisecond-Level Transactions + High Verifiability

If the Layer1 public chain is compared to a crowded provincial road, Jovay is an efficient ring road that perfectly matches the high-frequency, large-value, and reliable transaction needs in the new energy finance field.

Jovay's core technology highlights

• High-performance transactions : Supporting 100,000 transactions per second (TPS) and 100 millisecond response time, entering the era of "millisecond-level trusted transactions".
• Three-stage hierarchical confirmation mechanism : Combining trusted execution environment (TEE) and zero-knowledge proof (zk) technology to ensure transaction security and verifiability, while seamlessly connecting to Layer 1 chains such as Ethereum.
• “Two chains and one bridge” architecture : Collaborate with AntChain and its cross-chain bridge AntChain Bridge to build an ecological closed loop for the digitalization of global assets.
• Ethereum compatibility : Fully supports the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), lowering the threshold for developers to migrate across platforms.
• New energy assets on the chain : 14 million new energy devices (such as charging piles and photovoltaic equipment) have been put on the chain to create the world's largest new energy chain asset pool.
• Consensus mechanism : adopts a "three-stage hierarchical confirmation" design, namely: institutional node pre-verification (similar to enterprise-level consensus), public chain decentralized verification (ensuring network security), and ZKP verification (ensuring transaction privacy and authenticity).
• The consensus core integrates TEE (Trusted Execution Environment) and zero-knowledge proof to achieve high throughput and low latency (peak TPS of more than 100,000 and latency of less than 100 milliseconds).

DTVM virtual machine: the integration of open source and AI In addition, Jovay simultaneously launched the AI-driven DTVM (DeTerministic Virtual Machine), an open source blockchain virtual machine. Its highlights include:

• AI optimization : Integrate the SmartCogent large model framework to increase the efficiency of smart contract execution by 30 times.
• Open source ecosystem : Based on Apache License 2.0, the code is open on GitHub, attracting global developers to participate.
• Multi-language support : Provide multi-language SDK to eliminate the "language barrier" in development.

This means that Jovay is not only an infrastructure platform, but also an institutional innovation that reconstructs the cost structure and improves the efficiency of asset circulation.

2.3 Application ecology: practical examples from photovoltaics to carbon assets

Since its launch, Jovay has focused on pilot applications in green finance and the real economy:

• New energy assets : In cooperation with GCL Energy, we successfully completed China's first photovoltaic power station physical asset RWA project, involving an amount of more than 200 million yuan (about 27.7 million US dollars). With 82MW of household photovoltaic assets in Hubei and Hunan as anchor targets, the operation data and revenue streams were encrypted on the chain through blockchain + IoT technology to form a traceable and tamper-proof digital token. Ant Digital's technology platform has supported the project to achieve asset rights confirmation and capital tokenization circulation, and it can be expanded to scenarios such as carbon asset trading in the future. In addition, Jovay also participated in the world's first RWA demonstration of battery swap station assets : Patrol Eagle Travel, a subsidiary of Patrol Eagle Group, issued RWA wealth management products in Hong Kong with national battery swap cabinets and lithium batteries as targets, with a total scale of tens of millions of Hong Kong dollars. In this project, Ant Digital provided technical support with Conflux, VDX, AW3 and other institutions, and packaged the vehicle battery swap business data on the chain through blockchain + IoT to form a digital token, which significantly improved asset liquidity and transparency. At present, this model has become a demonstration sample for domestic new energy asset financing.
• Green Financing and ESG : Ant Digits actively participates in international green finance cooperation. Its Web3 brand "ZAN" has reached a strategic cooperation with the blockchain project Sui to jointly promote the tokenization of RWA in the ESG field (for example, converting green energy assets into financing tokens on the Sui chain). In August 2024, Langxin Technology (an international energy digital service provider) cooperated with Ant Digits to complete the first new energy RWA case in China in the Ensemble sandbox led by the Hong Kong Monetary Authority: tokenized financing for more than 9,000 charging piles, with a scale of about 100 million yuan. In this series of explorations, Ant Digits also cooperated with regulatory agencies such as the Hong Kong Monetary Authority to promote financial innovations such as tokenized deposit settlement through the Ensemble project. For example, in a trade finance theme case, banks such as HSBC, Hang Seng, and Bank of China (Hong Kong) used tokenized deposits to achieve DVP delivery of electronic bills of lading. These practices all revolve around the theme of "green sustainable finance", aiming to bring round-the-clock liquidity to new energy assets through the chain, connecting green projects around the world (such as South American photovoltaics, Middle Eastern energy, and Southeast Asian energy storage) to the global capital market.
• Developer Ecosystem : Jovay platform has opened its core technology stack to the public. The DTVM virtual machine is completely open source (Apache-2.0 protocol) and supports multiple smart contract languages such as Solidity, Rust, Java, Go, C++, and AssemblyScript. At the same time, the SmartCogent toolset is open to developers, providing AI smart contract generation, automatic security auditing, one-click deployment and other functions, greatly reducing the threshold for cross-platform development and security risks. These initiatives are aimed at attracting global Web3 developers to build RWA applications on Jovay and enrich the on-chain ecosystem.
• Partners : Currently, Jovay has gathered many green financial institutions, energy companies and Web3 infrastructure projects to participate in the ecological construction. In the new energy asset pilot, Ant Digits has joined hands with leading companies such as GCL Energy, Langxin Technology, and Xunying Group to form a closed-loop demonstration. In addition, public chain projects such as Conflux and VDX and the AW3 Foundation also provide technical solutions and incubation support for related RWA projects. Bian Zhuoqun, President of Ant Digits' Blockchain Business, said that after years of technical research and development, a comprehensive solution of "two chains and one bridge" has been built, and he is very much looking forward to technical cooperation with global institutions to jointly explore the value of RWA. It can be foreseen that with the continuous construction of this ecology, Jovay's influence in the field of green finance and physical assets will be further enhanced.

2.4 Team Background and Development Roadmap

The Jovay project is led by Zhang Chenguang, head of L2 blockchain at Ant Financial (formerly head of AI engineering at Megvii Technology), and the core technical team comes from Ant Chain, the Supercomputing Department, and the Pharos project. 🕒 Development Milestones

• 2023: Ant completes the Pharos L1 chain experiment and accumulates global infrastructure experience.
• 2024: Jovay project is launched, and the underlying architecture and dual-chain design are completed.
• 2025.4: Release Jovay white paper at RWA REAL UP Summit in Dubai.
• 2025.6: Plan to launch a test network and open it to developers.
• 2025.Q3: The target mainnet will be launched and the first batch of RWA asset cross-chain transactions will be realized.

🔮Future plans

• Build a global RWA standard asset library
• Promote cross-border green bonds and carbon asset chain financing
• Open interfaces with mainstream public chains and Web2 platforms to enrich application scenarios

2.5 Token Economics

Jovay explicitly does not issue native tokens , and its operating economy is different from traditional public chains:

• No native Gas token : The gas fee mechanism is not public, and it is expected to adopt multi-currency support or enterprise-level service settlement model.
• Non-staking economy : no token incentive mechanisms such as inflation and halving are designed.
• Flexible support for ecological tokens : On-chain projects can customize token models, and Jovay only provides ledgers and settlement infrastructure.

This design is in line with its positioning as a financial infrastructure and avoids regulatory risks caused by the public chain economic model.

2.6 Security and Compliance

Jovay emphasizes the dual protection of "technical security + compliance security":

• Technical security : TEE + ZKP ensures that every transaction is verifiable, traceable, and private.
• Compliance and security : Drawing on the VIE architecture design, the two-chain-one-bridge model ensures that data is retained within the country in compliance with regulations and transaction information is reportable; actively participate in the pilot projects of Hong Kong Ensemble and Dubai Financial Authority.
• Audit and risk control : The third-party audit report and vulnerability bounty program have not been disclosed yet, but the project is backed by Ant Financial-level security system.

Jovay represents an important step in Ant Group's globalization strategy for blockchain infrastructure. It is different from the "coin issuance-mining-community" model of traditional public chains. Instead, it is positioned at the enterprise and financial levels, focusing on RWA asset on-chain and cross-border transaction scenarios. Its future development results will depend on:

• Can it form a demonstration application in multiple financial highlands?
• Can it continue to win the trust of global financial institutions and real economy enterprises?
• Further transparency and openness of technology and compliance systems

For the blockchain industry, Jovay is an important exploration sample of the penetration of the Web3 world into the real economy and the standardization of RWA financing.

1. The tipping point of the 16 trillion market: the intersection of China and the world

3.1 China: RWA test field for new energy assets

China is seizing the RWA innovation high ground by taking new energy assets as a starting point. In 2025, the historic intersection of industry intelligent transformation and blockchain technology will drive the wave of asset digitization. Cases such as GCL's photovoltaic RWA and Langxin's charging pile RWA have verified the potential for the transformation of physical assets into on-chain liquidity. More importantly, at the end of March this year, the first RWA on-chain standard project in China was established, marking a key step in technical standardization. Through the Hong Kong market, Ant Digits is opening up the conversion channel between domestic assets and overseas funds. The Hong Kong Ensemble sandbox provides it with a compliance path, enabling Chinese green assets to connect with global capital and form a win-win situation of "low transaction costs + low management costs".

3.2 Global: The collision between the Middle East and Web3

At the same time, the Middle East is shifting from an oil economy to a digital energy hub. In 2024, clean energy investment in the Middle East reached $27 billion, accounting for 15.6% of total energy investment. Its sovereign wealth fund has a management scale of up to $3.64 trillion, and has the potential to build a trillion-dollar RWA transaction ecosystem. Jovay's global layout is based in Dubai, and it cooperates with institutions such as HSBC and Standard Chartered to explore compliant RWA business, showing the complementary effects of institutional innovation and ecological experiments. Under the wave of deglobalization, the SWIFT system and the blockchain clearing and settlement channel are running in parallel, and traditional financial giants and Web3 native institutions are competing for liquidity dominance. The emergence of Jovay is accelerating the reconstruction of this value network.

3.3 RWA Roadmap: Ant Financial’s In-depth Layout

The launch of Jovay is only a small part of Ant Digital's RWA footprint. Since the Langxin charging pile project, Ant Digital has continued to exert its strength in the RWA track. From August 24 to May today, in just less than a year, Ant Digital has done a lot.

• In August 2024, it cooperated with Longxin Technology to complete the first cross-border financing of charging pile RWA, and obtained 100 million yuan of offshore RMB funds. This project has attracted the attention of the industry to Ant Digits, and also laid the tone for its RWA strategy.
• In October 2015, Ant Financial announced its "Two Bridges and One Chain" technology solution to help connect assets with overseas funds and promote their global circulation.
• After that, in December 2015 and March 2016, Ant Digits completed the RWA projects of photovoltaic assets and battery swap assets with GCL-Poly Energy and Patrol Eagle Group respectively.
• From March to April 25, we completed important events such as "RWA on-chain technical specification project", "headquarters settled in Hong Kong" and the "Jovay blockchain launch".

From the RWA strategic layout roadmap of Ant Digital, three core directions can be sorted out: 1. Technology builds a moat. With the "two chains and one bridge" technology system and Jovay blockchain as the core, Ant Digital has formed significant competitiveness in the field of RWA technology, and established the industry's voice by leading the formulation of RWA technical specifications. The precipitation of this underlying technical capability provides key infrastructure support for Ant Digital's business ecology . 2. Benchmark projects create an industrial paradigm. With specific projects to promote the implementation of technology, new energy assets have become an important breakthrough. Starting from the Langxin New Energy Project, Ant Digital has determined to take the "sustainable finance" route, anchoring new energy assets to create an industrial paradigm , and has put 14 million new energy equipment (charging piles, photovoltaic panels, etc.) on the chain, forming the world's largest on-chain green asset platform. 3. Promote "technology going overseas" in stages . From the mainland to Hong Kong and then to Dubai in the Middle East, Ant Digital has stepped out to expand its globalization path. At present, Ant Digital has settled its overseas headquarters in Hong Kong and focused its strategic focus on Dubai, building a "dual hub synergy effect" between the two financial centers to promote the global transformation to a digital economy.

1. Challenges and prospects:

4.1 Real Challenges: Crossing the “Three Gates” of the Cycle

Although Jovay represents an important breakthrough in the field of RWA, its future path is not smooth and it still faces three challenges: 4.1.1 Regulatory uncertainty: The global governance structure has not yet stabilized. Although Hong Kong and Dubai provide relatively friendly innovation sandboxes and Jovay has achieved initial results, the regulatory thinking in the European and American markets is still wavering. Although the United States has promoted the legislative process of the "Stablecoin Act" and the "TOKEN Act", the compliance boundaries of RWA have not yet been clearly defined. After the implementation of the EU MiCA, it has a neutral attitude towards RWA, but still requires high transparency of asset data, KYC, and audit links. Once the regulatory wind suddenly changes, Jovay may be forced to adjust its pace of cross-border expansion. 4.1.2 Fierce competition in the track: global giants and local forces are intertwined and playing games . Stablecoin giants such as Tether and Circle are accelerating the layout of RWA, trying to incorporate it into the existing payment network and clearing system; local technology players such as JD.com, Yuanbi Technology, and Conflux are also continuing to test the waters of green assets on the chain, with local advantages in resources, scenarios and government relations. Although Jovay is backed by Ant Digits, it still needs to achieve a triple leap in "technology-ecosystem-scenario" to establish a dominant position in the international public chain ecosystem. 4.1.3. Reputation risk: the dilemma of identity and the tension of narrative In mainland China, crypto assets are always in a sensitive area. How to balance the dual roles of "blockchain infrastructure going overseas" and "domestic compliance innovation" is a difficult problem that Ant Digits must deal with in the long run. Its "coinless public chain" design can effectively reduce policy risks at present, but as its business expands to a wider range of open financial scenarios such as DeFi and DAO, Jovay still needs to walk a tightrope between compliance and openness.

4.2 Strategic Outlook: Building a New Network for Trusted Transactions

Despite the challenges, Jovay also has a clear strategic rhythm and long-term path. 4.2.1 Short-term key milestones (2025)

• June : The test network was officially launched, opening up the developer ecosystem to access;
• Q3 : The mainnet is launched, supporting the first batch of RWA projects for cross-chain circulation;
• Q4 : We plan to release the “Green Asset Tokenization White Paper” to form an asset standard and valuation system.

4.2.2 Mid-term Ecosystem Layout (2025–2027)

• Establish a global RWA standard asset library to promote on-chain structured pricing of new energy, carbon assets, and supply chain assets;
• Deepen cooperation with sovereign funds and energy companies in emerging markets such as the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and Latin America, and expand the synergy mechanism of "on-chain financing-off-chain production capacity";
• Launch basic modules such as AI-driven automatic asset rating and automatic contract generation to form a digital infrastructure for green finance.

4.2.3 Long-term Value Vision (2030) Jovay’s ultimate vision is not only to become a “highway” on the RWA chain, but also to serve as the hub of a global trusted value network, connecting real-world values scattered across different geographies, systems, and asset forms. In this network——

• Energy value will migrate across borders, from Dubai’s sunshine driving Chinese manufacturing to leveraging European financing through carbon credits;
• Asset pricing will be decentralized, and photovoltaic power plants, carbon sinks, and green bonds will be circulated and re-mortgaged in real time on the chain;
• User experience will also be revolutionized. In the future, individuals may be able to "dig" computing resources through photovoltaic production capacity and use carbon credits to pay for coffee, truly realizing a new financial order of "assets as accounts and computing power as currency."

1. Rebuilding global trust in trusted transactions

From the joint-stock companies in the 17th century to the blockchain networks in the 21st century, every evolution of the trading system is a redefinition of the "trust cost" and "efficiency boundary". RWA, as a digital form of real-world assets, is a reconstruction of the trading logic based on technology. Jovay is not only another technological leap for Ant Digits, but also an attempt by Chinese scientific and technological forces to compete for the right to speak in the new order in the global value chain. Driven by the high-performance Layer2 architecture, Jovay has reshaped the basic unit of "trusted transactions":

• Allow small assets such as charging piles and photovoltaic panels to obtain on-chain identities.
• Let the fragmented income be aggregated in the form of tokens and enter the capital network.
• It allows global investors to use smart contracts to achieve cross-border asset allocation and clearing and settlement in seconds.

With the support of DTVM virtual machine and SmartCogent intelligent tool set, developers can participate in the underlying architecture design of the new generation of green finance without having to master cryptography in depth or repeatedly auditing codes. This means that a transformation from a centralized financial engineer to a global collaborative developer is also quietly happening. More importantly, Jovay has not fallen into the inertial logic of "issuing coins is an economic model, and mining is a consensus incentive", but has positioned itself with minimal infrastructure to accurately serve the financing, circulation and compliance needs in the real economy. It does not rely on hype, but on a feasible value flow link, step by step to open up the full-link closed loop of asset chain, financing token, settlement and delivery. In the future, as green bonds, carbon credits, cross-border energy assets, etc. continue to enter the Jovay network, we will gradually witness the birth of a global value network "anchored by real assets and based on on-chain transactions". This is not only a challenge letter from Web3 to traditional finance, but also a trust innovation in the digital age. Perhaps in the near future, every time you charge your electric car and every kilowatt-hour of photovoltaic power generated in your home will generate an on-chain income; you can click "Invest" in the App to configure carbon forest bonds from Brazil or solar energy assets in the Middle East; you are no longer just using currency, but real value units that can "breathe", "grow" and "keep accounts". In an era of inflationary instability, changing policies and frequent cycles, what Jovay wants to do is not to create virtual wealth, but to make the real world truly visible, valued and circulated on the chain.