Aave Labs has announced a collaboration with Ant Digital Technologies in an effort aimed at building a custom RWA market on Ethereum.

The partnership involves Horizon, an institutional-grade decentralized finance products platform launched by Aave Labs earlier this year.

Aave (AAVE) founder Stani Kulechov said in an announcement on May 9 that the new market will target qualified users, allowing them to borrow stablecoins with their tokenized real world assets as collateral.

“I‘m pleased to announce Horizon’s strategic collaboration with Ant Digital Technologies, one of the largest blockchain technology services providers in the world,” Kuchelov posted on X. “We will work with them on a custom RWA market on Ethereum.”

Aave Labs introduced Horizon in March, eyeing it as a custom RWA platform designed to bridge decentralized finance and institutional adoption.

The Ethereum-based protocol’s first product is tokenized money market funds.

Institutional investors can use the MMFs as collateral when looking to tap into stablecoin liquidity.

The partnership with Ant Digital Technologies, the digital technology subsidiary of Ant Group, comes as the RWA market gains notable traction. Global asset managers such as BlackRock have become key players amid increased institutional demand.

Horizon seeks to unlock further adoption of blockchain and crypto across the Aave ecosystem.

“By aligning with institutional standards while preserving DeFi’s core efficiencies, Horizon unlocks a compliant, scalable, and accessible pathway for institutions and tokenization platforms to engage in decentralized finance,” Aave Labs wrote in a blog post.

Stani Kulechov said the strategic collaboration between Horizon and Anti Digital is major milestone.

“DeFi will be the backbone of global finance and this is a significant step towards enabling institutional adoption of DeFi,” Kulechov added.

The Aave ecosystem continues to dominate the DeFi market, with total value locked on the protocol currently at over $23 billion.

Per DeFiLlama data, the DeFi TVL stands at over $111 billion.Aave leads Lido, EigenLayer and Sky, formerly MakerDAO in TVL.