ENI's RWA ambitions: Building an enterprise-grade BaaS platform to enable Web2 institutions to "do more than just asset on-chain"

Author: momo, ChainCatcher

At the recently concluded Hong Kong Blockchain Week RWI Summit, RWA infrastructure project ENI founder Arion Ho jointly launched a $1 million global acceleration program with Hong Kong Legislative Council member Wu Jiezhuang and Hong Kong’s well-known incubator Web3Labs CEO Casper. At the same event, ENI also signed an institutional-level strategic cooperation agreement on RWA and digital asset treasury with licensed financial group Aide Financial.

This is not an isolated debut. Not long ago, ENI had just partnered with Republic Crypto, which is backed by institutions like Hamilton Lane, Hashed, and Morgan Stanley, with an ecosystem covering over 2,500 enterprises. In less than a month, in just a few weeks, ENI has achieved a “triple hit” of political endorsement, traditional financial institution cooperation, and top crypto capital collaboration.

But more attention-grabbing than these frequent moves is ENI’s RWA ambitions.

ENI is an enterprise-level modular L1 designed for large-scale commercial scenarios, emphasizing unlimited TPS processing capacity, currently expanding from the underlying network to an enterprise-grade BaaS platform.

Unlike traditional public chains that focus on asset issuance and trading, ENI emphasizes “how the system runs on-chain”—through the underlying settlement network (ENI), payment and authorization layer (ENI PAY), and AI Agent execution system, unifying enterprise assets, cash flows, and business processes on-chain, enabling continuous operation within a compliance framework.

Based on this, ENI also offers a view on the next phase of RWA: RWA 2.0 is no longer just “asset on-chain,” but a business system driven by AI Agents that continuously runs on-chain. ENI aims to become Hong Kong’s “chief architect” for this new era.

What market opportunities does ENI see? How does it plan to realize this goal? During Hong Kong Blockchain Week, its founder Arion Ho shared an interview with ChainCatcher.

From “RWA Public Chain” to “Enterprise BaaS Platform”

To understand ENI’s path, we must first look at Arion Ho’s background.

He is not a typical crypto entrepreneur. Before entering Web3, Arion worked extensively in traditional finance, holding positions at HKEX, UBS, Standard Chartered, accumulating over twenty years of experience. Later, he entered the regulated digital asset space, working at OSL and Zodia Markets (a Standard Chartered subsidiary), standing at the intersection of traditional finance and crypto.

It was in this position that he gradually saw a structural contradiction that is often overlooked: on one side, a stable, compliant traditional financial system capable of supporting real-world operations; on the other, a rapidly innovating Web3 world that remains largely at the “trading” level.

The issue isn’t which side is more advanced, but that they are solving fundamentally different problems.

In Arion’s view, the current RWA 1.0 supported by most blockchain infrastructure is essentially “tradeable”—assets can be transferred, priced, and circulated—but it is far from “operable,” unable to support complex business logic, long-term operations, or compliance systems. RWA 2.0, as defined by ENI, aims to address this.

“For institutions, the truly critical issue is never ‘whether it can be on-chain,’ but whether the system can run stably for years or even decades, who controls the ledger, who sets the rules, and who is responsible when problems occur. These issues are almost never directly addressed in existing mainstream public chain systems.”

Whether it’s Ethereum or Solana, their original design was not for enterprise-level complex scenarios: privacy and performance are hard to balance, compliance and control cannot be embedded, and institutions find it difficult to migrate smoothly while retaining their governance structures.

This led Arion to a somewhat counterintuitive conclusion: “What really needs blockchain are not crypto-native projects, but entities that already hold real assets, stable cash flows, and mature business systems—public companies, asset managers, cross-border enterprises.” What they need isn’t just a “ticket to on-chain,” but a long-term operational business system.

From this perspective, the market space begins to clarify. Market data shows that the global enterprise blockchain market is expected to reach about $57.7 billion by 2025 and over $1.4 trillion by 2030. The next five years are widely regarded as a golden growth period for this track—a still early but potentially massive blue ocean market worth trillions.

ENI initially entered as a “RWA public chain.” But as the product iterates and deepens its engagement with more traditional institutions, the team gradually realizes: providing just a chain is far from enough.

During the recent Web3 Festival, ENI underwent a key redefinition—from “enterprise-level RWA public chain” to “enterprise-level blockchain BaaS (Blockchain as a Service).”

This shift reflects a new understanding of its role. Arion explained that the name ENI comes from ENIAC, the first general-purpose computer in human history, symbolizing the transition from theoretical computing to infrastructure.

He sees that today’s blockchain is at a similar node. ENI’s goal isn’t to create a “faster chain,” but to offer a comprehensive system enabling enterprises to truly “run their business on-chain.”

How to build a “bridge” between Web2 and Web3?

“Bridge” is almost a keyword for all RWA projects, and ENI is no exception. But in Arion’s view, in enterprise-level complex scenarios, a “bridge” cannot be just a technical module; it must be a complete system engineering.

With the introduction of AI Agents, the complexity increases further. Arion mentioned that if past blockchains mainly served “human” transactions, future systems are likely to be “rules defined by humans, executed by machines.” In this structure, on-chain systems will need to handle not only assets but also automate business logic—from order generation, fund dispatch, to settlement and auditing—all performed by AI.

This means a single “chain” is no longer sufficient. ENI’s solution is built around this shift.

Architecturally, ENI does not stay at the traditional single-layer public chain design. Instead, it constructs a layered system: breaking down “operation” into three key components—execution, payment, and settlement.

• Top layer: AI Agent execution layer. Here, humans only define rules and strategies; specific transactions, calls, and business processes are automated by AI. ENI reserves support for Agents at the underlying level, allowing them to directly invoke on-chain resources, rather than relying solely on off-chain tools.

• Middle layer: ENI PAY payment and authorization layer. ENIPAY is the latest core product incubated within the ENI ecosystem, serving as the official payment gateway connecting on-chain and off-chain worlds. ENI provides the underlying chain and settlement capabilities, while ENIPAY offers payment services, handling real-world payment settlement and authorization. This layer addresses a missing link in most public chain systems: assets can be transferred on-chain but are hard to enter real payment networks, let alone support continuous commercial flows. ENIPAY aims to bridge this gap, enabling on-chain assets to directly enter consumption, settlement, and cross-border circulation scenarios. In practice, ENI PAY already supports multi-country QR code payments, connects to Visa and Mastercard networks, and offers virtual and physical cards. This means on-chain assets are no longer just “tradeable,” but can be directly used for consumption, settlement, and cross-border flows.

• Bottom layer: ENI settlement layer and AppChain architecture. Unlike the single shared ledger design of traditional public chains, ENI provides each institution with an independent ledger environment via AppChains, allowing custom rules, audit paths, and compliance modules, while cross-chain settlement and security are managed through the mainnet.

This structure results in a direct change: institutions no longer need to conform to public chain rules but can retain their governance structures while connecting to on-chain systems.

Comparing this entire system with mainstream public chains reveals a clear distinction: chains like Ethereum and Solana essentially provide “ledger + execution environment,” whereas ENI aims to deliver a complete “execution + payment + settlement” system, more akin to traditional financial infrastructure.

This difference is already reflected in actual collaborations.

Currently, ENI has partnered with traditional asset management firms like JLL to explore systematic on-chain operation of large projects. In scenarios like metropolitan areas, what’s on-chain is no longer just a single asset but a full business system including land, cash flows, financing structures, and operational rules.

This may also explain why ENI repeatedly emphasizes “system layer”: the “bridge” is no longer just about connecting two ends, but about enabling this system to operate continuously.

Hong Kong as a Hub: Accelerating ENI’s Institutional Partnership Expansion

If the first two parts answered “why” and “how,” then the series of actions following the mainnet launch seem to address a third question: has this system truly started operating?

From on-chain ecosystem data, the system has begun to form a preliminary operational scale: currently over 3.6 million addresses, about 17k daily active addresses; TVL exceeds $82 million; and 24-hour transaction count remains around 32k.

Compared to focusing on short-term trading volume or on-chain activity, ENI prefers to disclose “system-level indicators,” including network stability, node operation, and enterprise onboarding progress. Current disclosures show its underlying network can handle thousands of TPS and supports multi-chain AppChain deployment, gradually enabling the chain to host real business systems.

The real “acceleration” of ENI is reflected on the institutional side. Recently, ENI’s collaborations have shown a clear trajectory: cooperation with traditional finance and real economy entities is accelerating.

During a roundtable at the recent Hong Kong Web3 Festival, ENI revealed several key partners, each representing different roles in the RWA ecosystem—from asset supply, structuring, compliance, to capital organization, forming a complete chain.

• Republic Crypto as a capital and distribution gateway. This type of institution naturally connects Web3 projects with global capital, functioning as a well-established capital organization network. The discussion repeatedly emphasized that RWA currently does not lack assets; the real bottleneck is how to effectively organize and allocate capital to assets. Republic’s role is to connect on-chain and off-chain capital, making assets not just “issuable,” but “bought and tradable.”

• Licensed financial institutions like Aide Financial. These partnerships address the core and most immediate barrier of RWA: trust and compliance. More than technology, these institutions care about whether assets have clear legal structures, whether on-chain representations reflect real-world ownership, and whether the entire transaction process is within regulatory bounds. In other words, they are working to integrate “on-chain systems” into the “real legal framework,” giving RWA a foundation accepted by mainstream finance.

• Traditional asset management and operation firms like JLL. They represent the asset side and operational capacity. This means not only real assets can enter on-chain but also that they have the full ability for asset screening, structuring, and cash flow management. As discussed in the roundtable, the key to RWA isn’t just tokenizing assets but ensuring the revenue, distribution, and operational mechanisms behind assets can sustain ongoing operation. Their participation extends the on-chain scope from “issuance” to “operation.”

• Other key but more “middle-layer” participants like Ink Finance. Their role is to bridge traditional finance and on-chain systems—deciding which parts are suitable for on-chain and which remain off-chain, often through layered structures like feeder funds, enabling gradual expansion without full on-chain migration.

This acceleration process makes Hong Kong’s role especially critical. On one hand, regulatory clarity is rapidly emerging: in February, China’s eight ministries issued Document No. 42, opening a compliant channel for offshore RWA issuance of domestic assets under a filing system, increasing institutional confidence.

On the other hand, ENI’s choice of Hong Kong as a “bridgehead” is also deeply rooted in the team’s background. Founder Arion Ho has long been embedded in Hong Kong’s financial system, with experience spanning traditional investment banking, licensed trading platforms, and digital asset markets. This background makes him familiar with the real needs of institutions and the local regulatory and compliance boundaries.

In a sense, ENI isn’t “entering Hong Kong,” but starting from Hong Kong.

Based on this, its target clients are clearer: entities with real assets and stable cash flows, including listed companies, asset managers, and cross-border enterprises.

To further accelerate, ENI is also launching more structured incentive mechanisms.

The “Top 100 Institutional Node Program” essentially aims to bring in resourceful and capable participants to maintain the network and expand applications. These nodes are not just validators but may also become business gateways and ecosystem organizers. Complementing this are the “Top 100 Ecosystem Matrix” and DAOaaS (DAO as a Service) frameworks, which modularize governance and incentive mechanisms, enabling enterprises to quickly build on-chain collaboration structures tailored to their needs.

This means ENI is not only building technical infrastructure but also providing a full toolkit for “organization and operation.”

Technical Foundation: Why ENI Can Support “Enterprise-Grade Systems”?

If institutional resources and compliance are ENI’s “front end,” then its underlying technical architecture is the “back end” supporting everything.

Unlike most public chains designed for trading scenarios, ENI is built from the ground up around “system operation,” with core capabilities summarized into three layers.

• First, a layered architecture designed for enterprises. ENI adopts a “Mainnet + Hub + AppChain” structure: the mainnet handles final settlement and global consensus; the Hub chain manages cross-chain communication and coordination; each AppChain provides an independent execution environment for each institution. This means enterprises no longer need to share rules within a single ledger but can define their own business logic and operations on their own chain, while using the Hub for cross-system collaboration—forming a “self-contained but interconnected” structure.

• Second, a system design focused on control and compliance. For institutions, the main concern isn’t just technology but control over their assets. ENI’s AppChains give back control over ledger rules, permissions, and audit paths to the enterprise, allowing them to operate on-chain within regulatory bounds without sacrificing governance.

• Third, supporting real-world parallelism. Financial activities in the real world are rarely linear; they run in parallel. ENI’s parallel execution architecture and horizontal scalability enable the system to handle large transaction volumes and complex business logic simultaneously. Current TPS can reach tens of thousands, with room for further expansion—aiming not just for speed but for sustained business throughput.

Building on this, ENI further enhances enterprise-level security and collaboration. Its core contracts have passed CertiK audits, and with traditional auditors like HLB, ensuring on-chain assets map to real-world legal ownership. Cross-chain atomic communication mechanisms guarantee consistency and security during multi-chain operations.

Overall, ENI isn’t just optimizing chain performance but constructing a long-term operational system for enterprises.

When Will the Breakout Point for Enterprise Blockchain Arrive?

Arion believes the true inflection point for enterprise blockchain won’t come from a single technological breakthrough but from a more pragmatic condition: when institutions find this system more efficient, safer, and sustainable than their existing systems. That moment is approaching.

Looking back, ENI’s advantages can be summarized in four words: Compliance DNA, Enterprise Architecture, Hong Kong Hub, AI Agent Forward-Looking Layout. Arion’s twenty years of traditional finance experience have made it clear from the start that what institutions need isn’t a faster chain, but a system capable of long-term operation. The mainnet plus AppChain architecture addresses control and privacy concerns. Hong Kong as a bridgehead offers a unique portal connecting mainland assets, international capital, and global regulation. The early deployment of AI Agents positions ENI at the dawn of the next era.

Whether ENI can realize its ambition to become the RWA 2.0 “chief architect” depends on one question: when enterprises are ready to go on-chain, is ENI the most mature and reliable choice?