Tokenizing China supply-chain assets
Dewu and Evident offer foreign investors new ways to access Chinese real-economy yields.
There exist ways for foreign investors to access Chinese supply-chain finance – if you have an institutional relationship with banks.
Now, Dewu Finance in Beijing and Evident in Hong Kong are tokenizing those flows to provide a yield, one that can readily circulate on global digital rails, while remaining compliant with familiar securities and funds law.
“You need to understand that we are just at the beginning of what will be a huge trend over the next decade,” said Florian Spiegel, founder and CEO of Evident. That may be a way of managing expectations around deal sizes, but it’s also a pointer to the future.
Evident is a Hong Kong-based investment platform for alternative assets. It is licensed by the Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission in the private-markets space to issue, distribute, custody, and operate a secondary market for tokenized securities.
Dewu Finance is a Beijing-based, fintech-focused venture capital firm. Its parent is Dewu, an e-commerce platform. This gives its finance business access to supply-chain data: it operates a supplier-relationship management (SRM) system that claims to process receivables for 2.4 million suppliers, plus over 1,000 large enterprise customers such as tech giants Xiaomi and consumer-electronics company Haier. Dewu says it processes more than Rmb5 trillion ($700 billion) annually.
It packages those receivables from large enterprise network of suppliers and buyers into investment structures regulated under China’s Qualified Foreign Limited Partner program (which allows foreign investors to invest in onshore private-equity and VC funds).
New access mode
Together they are building a vertically integrated, tokenized channel that connects global capital to Chinese high-tech and export supply chains, via the regulatory frameworks of China’s QFLP and Hong Kong’s SFC. Evident is the licensed onchain gateway and Dewu is the originator of the supply-chain credit.
By combining real-time supply-chain data, and short-duration receivables with Hong Kong’s license regime for tokenized securities, they are creating a new yield product against “the workshop of the world”. Each unit of capital is matched to actual goods and orders, with repayment sourced from trade settlement cash flows.
Boran Ding, managing partner at Dewu Finance, says this allows investors to “lock in supply-chain alpha” in a world of global yield compression. It gives investors access to counter‑cyclical, low‑correlation returns while channeling capital into sectors Beijing wants to support (high‑tech exports, manufacturing upgrading, EV infrastructure).
China’s armada of suppliers are starved for credit, and will pay a premium to access funding. Accessing this requires rapid loan approval for credits that local banks generally refuse to handle.
Their tokenized product aims to provide a yield of 8 to 9 percent, but Ding says this could rise to 12 to 18 percent over time, once the product is proven and can structure into different levels of risk. That is attractive against US Treasury yields (currently around 3.5 percent for 12 months, and 4.2 percent for 10 years).
Licensed and compliant
There are other ways to invest in China supply-chain yields, but they are large-scale and restricted to institutions: buying debt or asset-backed securities syndicated by banks operating onshore, or via global private-credit funds.
Tokenization, on the other hand, turns these data‑rich, granular receivables into programmable, small‑ticket securities that can be held in digital wallets, settled near‑instantly, and potentially used as collateral in future lending or DeFi‑adjacent structures.
The mechanism is straightforward: Foreign investors subscribe to a tokenized security in Hong Kong; Dewu channels those proceeds via QFLP to the underlying receivables and then repatriates the cash flows from supply-chain assets, after tax and FX conversion, back to Evident in Hong Kong, which distributes these yields to token holders.
This isn’t part of the SFC’s licensing regime for digital assets. It’s under the SFC’s normal rules for securities, only they are traveling on blockchain rails. This set-up falls under the SFC’s mantra of “same product, same rules, same risks” for regulating tokenized securities.
Implications
Add it up, and the Dewu/Evident partnership points to several important trends.
First, it shows that real-world asset tokenization is able to move from proofs of concept into production. This isn’t just tokenizing US Treasuries to provide crypto investors with a little yield.
Second, it points to a complete rewiring of capital-markets infrastructure. Tokenization will gradually absorb more private credit, private equity, infrastructure, and real estate, along with collectibles. These illiquid and quirky assets will be able to provide much more liquidity as they are digitalized, and start to trade alongside public-market securities.
Third, the value of a tokenized asset isn’t just its legal wrapper (as a claim to an income stream), but provides value as a live data stream of purchasing orders, logistics milestones, and credit scores. This shows that tokenization can unlock new, previously inaccessible cash-flow pools, and not just repurpose existing products. Those data flows may also be useful to assuage foreign investors who distrust the opacity that comes with China’s credit markets, enshrouded by capital controls and tight limits on data leaving the country.
Fourth, there will be demand for innovative products. Spiegel says worldwide some $12 trillion of private wealth is moving into private markets. He notes that today private investors already control 54 percent of global wealth (estimated at $300 trillion) but make up only 16 percent of private-market assets under management.
Currently, family offices access illiquids via their private banks, although some are using fintechs such as iCapital and Moonfare to do so. But those wealthtechs are merely representing private clients as omnibus investors in large-scale funds. Tokenization implies those investors can participate directly, in much smaller amounts, through a platform like Evident’s or other digital marketplaces.
Over time, of course, Dewu-like structures could themselves be listed or referenced on larger tokenized exchanges, crypto exchanges, or integrated into mainstream wealth platforms. This would make Chinese supply chains just another sleeve in multi-asset portfolios. One day!
Fifth, this product highlights Hong Kong’s strengths as an emerging digital-assets hub. Whatever the merits of Dubai and Abu Dhabi, they cannot plug into the Chinese economy. Hong Kong’s unique combination of a common-law legal system, internationally recognized financial regulation, and vocal backing for securities tokenization positions it as a bridge between mainland assets and global investors.
Risks
There are risks, too.
First, although QFLP is by now well known (it was launched in 2010), it is not always easy to navigate. The program now allows distributions to be made during the life of a fund, not just at its termination, which makes liquidity possible, particularly for short-duration supply-chain products.
Nevertheless, Chinese regulators use the tools that they have, including scrutinizing FX transactions among banks, or adjusting flows so suit changes in macro policy and capital controls. One reason for the attractive yields is to compensate investors for structural and FX risks, not just the underlying credit risk. Offshore investors do not enjoy explicit guarantees in the event these flows are curtailed. Nor do we know what Chinese regulators might think if Dewu tokens end up being used as collateral on DeFi venues.
Second, China may be pouring resources into favored tech and export sectors, but its own macro conditions have been deteriorating. Its success stories depend on its ability to export. The US is closing the door. Europe may too, if it is to save its own manufacturing base. Emerging markets will remain open but they lack the scale and wealth of the combined West. The granularity and short duration of Dewu’s product mitigates such risks in the short run, but in return it may be handing investors a highly cyclical and concentrated sector bet.
Even within Dewu’s vast SRM ecosystem of suppliers and anchor companies, there may be less diversification than meets the eye. Instead there could be a lot of correlation risk within it.
Third, the data itself. Dewu also presents the data feeds and proprietary credit scoring as a transparent means to engender trust. Investors should explore what kind of governance exists around data integrity, model validation, and any possibility that suppliers or intermediaries can game the system. This may be hard for foreign investors to do by themselves.
Fourth: liquidity. Evident operates a secondary-market platform to allow token holders to exit, or for potential buyers to find deals. Investors should ask about market-making mandates, buyback programs, partnerships with larger exchanges, and other factors that will impact supply and demand for Dewu’s tokens. In other words, they need to calculate whether this is just a medium-term credit fund with digital reporting, or a truly tradable tokenized security?
Fifth, the optics: tokenized securities are governed by Hong Kong’s Securities and Futures Ordinance, a point that Spiegel repeats. He needs to, because many investors may just look at this and think, “crypto”, and worry about operational or legal risk.
Success
These risks and attendant questions will be answered, with time. Dewu needs to establish a track record over cycles of receivable pools, demonstrating low default rates, stable realized yields, and predictability around underlying cash flows. And the partners need to prove the case that digital risk controls will consistently outperform traditional, if paper-based, bank-credit processes.
The partners must also demonstrate that both interest and principal into these tokens will be reliably repatriated through QFLP.
Such success should engender scale, broader asset types, and integration with other tokenization rails and platforms. The long-term goal is for Dewu tokens trading on Evident to become standard components of Asia fixed-income and alternative allocations – and to make China assets more investible, via Hong Kong, without requiring Beijing to make changes to its capital controls.