Ultiland: The new RWA unicorn is rewriting the on-chain narrative of art, IP, and assets

Once attention forms a measurable and distributable structure on-chain, it lays the foundation for conversion into assets.

Written by: ChandlerZ, Foresight News

Over the past two years, RWA (Real World Assets) has become the most stable growth theme in the crypto asset market. The scale of US Treasuries, credit bonds, and short-term yield products on-chain continues to expand, and the capital flow structure between DeFi and traditional finance has become predictable again.

According to the latest report from Standard Chartered Bank, as DeFi becomes increasingly prevalent in payment and investment scenarios, the market value of non-stablecoin tokenized RWAs is expected to exceed $2 trillion by the end of 2028, far higher than the current $35 billion. Among them, tokenized money market funds and listed stocks may each account for about $750 billion, with the remainder consisting of funds, private equity, commodities, corporate debt, and real estate.

However, as the first phase of infrastructure gradually improves, the industry faces a common question: where does the space for further expansion come from?

On-chain markets are essentially global liquidity pools, while cultural assets themselves have the ability to spread across regions. Under this logic, the on-chain transformation of cultural assets becomes possible. It does not rely on a single sovereign system, nor is it limited by the information structure of the traditional art market. Users are no longer just spectators or collectors; they also become participants in the value network. The boundaries between culture and finance begin to blur.

The emergence of the Web3 creative asset platform Ultiland is based on this change. Ultiland is not positioned as a traditional art NFT platform, but rather as a "cultural asset tool." It starts from cultural assets such as art, IP, and cultural content, establishing an on-chain issuance, confirmation, circulation, and financialization model for them, transforming them into asset units with sustainable trading structures.

A New Narrative for RWA: On-Chain Transformation of Cultural and Creative Assets

The first phase of RWA mainly revolved around financial assets such as US Treasuries, real estate, and credit bonds. These products have clear cash flows and mature valuation models, making them suitable for institutional funds and high-net-worth investors. However, their asset sources depend on offline financial institutions, issuance is restricted by regulatory frameworks, product homogenization is increasing, and yields are greatly affected by macro interest rate cycles. For ordinary on-chain users, participation motivation mostly remains at arbitrage, which is disconnected from the native participation culture of crypto.

Meanwhile, cultural, artistic, and IP assets worldwide have long been in a state of high value but low liquidity. The cultural and art IP market is about $6.2 trillion in scale, but the circulation efficiency of this huge asset pool is very low, with assets mostly concentrated in the hands of a few collectors, institutions, and platforms. Creators often find it difficult to share in secondary market appreciation over the long term, and ordinary users rarely participate in early value formation. This is a typical mismatch between value and participation—asset value is concentrated, while participation rights are scarce.

The expansion of the attention economy and creator economy makes this mismatch even more apparent. Increasingly, value does not come from stable cash flows, but from community density, dissemination breadth, and cultural identity. The commercial returns of content, IP, and art projects largely depend on whether users are willing to invest their time and emotions. The difference between these assets and traditional RWAs is that the latter rely on yield curves, while the former depend on crowd structure and participation behavior. For a highly community-driven, globally liquid crypto market, the fit between cultural assets and on-chain mechanisms is actually higher than that of some traditional financial assets.

Therefore, cultural RWAs are expected to become a new logical direction for development. The underlying assets still come from the real world—artworks, IP copyrights, offline performances, or other cultural content—but value discovery is no longer just about discounted cash flows, but also incorporates narrative strength, user participation, and long-term cultural identity.

The challenge here lies in pricing. The traditional art and IP market relies on historical transaction records, authoritative institutions, and expert evaluations. This system is friendly to professional investors but extremely opaque to ordinary participants. Cultural value itself is highly subjective and difficult to solve with a single valuation model. Ultiland’s approach is to let the market participate in part of the valuation process, making on-chain participation, trading depth, and holding structure part of price discovery. Using ARToken and an innovative Meme-like RWA model, it builds a tradable experimental field for cultural assets. It introduces a more open participation layer, allowing cultural value to be reassessed with a larger sample size.

The change in participation threshold is equally important. High-value art and IP have long been open only to a small group, with thresholds often in the millions. After assets are split on-chain, they can be offered in smaller shares to a much larger user base, changing the capital structure rather than the artwork itself. For the stock market, this means that previously closed value units are included in the global liquidity pool for the first time; for the incremental market, this structure offers a participation method closer to capital markets and better fits crypto users’ habits of small, frequent, and diversified allocations.

Under this logic, what Ultiland is doing is not just selling art in a new way, but trying to establish a complete on-chain infrastructure for cultural assets. From confirmation and issuance, to splitting and trading, and then to a dual-token economic model for long-term value transfer. From the RWA evolution path, this is a branch that follows changes in the real economic structure: traditional financial RWAs handle capital and interest rates, while cultural RWAs handle attention and identity. The two differ in asset attributes, but on-chain they have the opportunity to be incorporated into the same market mechanism.

Ultiland’s Core Mechanism: On-Chain Issuance and Value Loop of Cultural Assets

The on-chain transformation of cultural assets requires a clear path. Ultiland’s attempt is to start from the business logic of art and IP, supporting the on-chain issuance and lifecycle management of a wide range of real-world assets, including artworks, collectibles, music, intellectual property, physical assets, and non-standard equity. Users can enjoy full-stack services: token minting, asset evaluation, decentralized auctions, and AI-assisted creation tools.

The value of this type of asset consists of three dimensions: cultural value, financial value, and application value. Ultiland attempts to establish a unified expression for these three on-chain and form a sustainable value cycle structure.

Ultiland’s foundational layer is ARToken. This is an on-chain unit representing cultural or artistic assets, expressing ownership and serving as the form of circulation in the market. ARToken supports the on-chain issuance of various assets such as artworks, antiques, design works, and IP copyrights, and completes the confirmation, valuation, issuance, and trading process through its RWA Launchpad.

Ultiland’s first market-facing case is EMQL, an art RWA project corresponding to the Qianlong period “Doucai entwined floral double-ear flat-belly vase.” This imperial kiln rarity originally belonged to a niche collection system, said to be a token of affection from Emperor Qianlong to his beloved concubine, with an extremely high price and currently held in custody in Hong Kong. Ultiland split it into 1 million ARToken on-chain, with a subscription price of 0.15 USDT each, making an asset that previously existed only in a closed market accessible on-chain.

On December 3, Ultiland launched its second RWA ARToken, HP59, a token based on “Here and Beyond - Spirit Series - No. 59” created by Wu Songbo, the dynamic sports icon designer for the 2022 Winter Olympics and a digital media artist. It symbolizes the fusion of nature and spirit, featuring a pheasant soaring above Taihu rocks, surrounded by bamboo forests and distant pine trees. The token signifies harmony, vitality, and eternal tranquility. HP59 reached a peak of 7.78 times its opening price.

Another mechanism of Ultiland emphasizes market-driven value discovery. This model, based on its Meme-like RWA model, applies the viral characteristics of Memes to cultural RWAs, allowing the market to participate in value discussions more openly in the early stages. The valuation process in the traditional art market is usually dominated by experts and institutions, while the on-chain model gives part of the valuation power to the market, reflecting the attention to cultural assets through participation behavior, trading density, and dissemination intensity.

The value of cultural assets is often difficult to measure with a single indicator, and market sentiment can provide real feedback from the demand side to some extent. Ultiland incorporates this feedback into the price discovery system, enabling cultural assets to gain a more proactive value expression space globally.

The most noteworthy aspect of Ultiland’s structure is its 2 + 1 token system (including ARTX, miniARTX, and user-defined ARToken), and the introduction of the VMSAP dynamic capacity adjustment mechanism to achieve a supply-demand-driven release path. According to official information, the maximum supply of ARTX is 280 million, of which 107 million are for community incentives, ecosystem construction, and global airdrops; 123 million will be produced through creative mining and staking participation. ARTX is the platform’s sovereign asset, used for value settlement and governance participation, while miniARTX is proof of user contribution.

miniARTX is the only release entry for ARTX; all new circulation must be completed through release and liquidity binding to form a closed supply system. Most of the platform’s income goes into the buyback pool to strengthen ARTX’s liquidity and scarcity. miniARTX is produced by users’ trading, creation, and promotion behaviors, making participation a source of value. For cultural assets, participation density itself is part of the value, and this model creates a linkage between the two.

• Exchanging miniARTX for ARTX incurs a 30% ecosystem tax, of which 10% is directly burned and 20% injected into the ecosystem incentive pool;
• On-chain transfers of miniARTX follow a 10→7 net logic: 1 is burned, 2 go into the ecosystem pool, continuously powering community incentives and liquidity maintenance;
• In some incentive scenarios, the 10% consumption of ARTX→miniARTX can be exempted, and specific counterparty transactions will have a 20% reward allocation.

The key here is the release cost. Users who want to convert miniARTX to ARTX must choose between linear or accelerated release, with accelerated release requiring additional funds and triggering a buyback. The release behavior continuously increases the buying power for ARTX, forming a stable value anchor for the token system. The miniARTX testnet is about to go live, marking a critical moment to verify Ultiland’s dual-token model.

Currently, Ultiland has built a five-module underlying framework around cultural assets. The RWA LaunchPad is responsible for splitting artworks, IP, and collectibles into tradable ARToken, providing a standardized issuance entry. All ARToken support staking/trading mining (as a participation-based contribution metric), rewarding community circulation and contribution. More innovative issuance models will be launched in the future; the Art AI Agent connects generative content with on-chain price signals, providing continuous creative supply for assets; IProtocol handles IP registration, authorization, and cross-chain usage, solidifying copyright and licensing relationships on-chain; DeArt ecosystem provides auction, rating, NFTization, and secondary trading environments for these assets, integrating creation and trading into the same market; SAE and RWA Oracle connect the custody, valuation, and data synchronization of offline assets, providing reliable on-chain mapping for real-world targets. The five modules correspond to issuance, creation, confirmation, trading, and compliance, forming a relatively complete cultural RWA infrastructure rather than a single application.

Ultiland’s Path to Becoming an RWA Unicorn

From a timeline perspective, Ultiland’s implementation actions have already formed a relatively clear path. After the EMQL issuance, its subscription speed was significantly faster than the team’s expectations, with the first round almost sold out instantly, showing clear user interest in ARToken cultural assets. This result provides the most direct market feedback: there is real demand for cultural assets on-chain, and the splitting model can effectively expand participation, bringing previously niche collectibles into a new price discovery system. On November 26, the Qianlong vase asset was transferred, and after the transfer is completed, it will soon enter the secondary market.

The market response to EMQL has laid the foundation for Ultiland’s subsequent expansion and enabled the team to allocate resources on a larger scale. Recently, Ultiland announced the launch of the Ultiland ART FUND, with a scale of 10,000,000 ARTX (about $50 million), to promote the entry of global traditional artists, creators, and cultural institutions into Web3, expanding the on-chain issuance and circulation of cultural assets. This fund will serve as Ultiland’s “Art IP Web3 Engine” and “Cultural RWA Growth Pool,” focusing on four main directions: incentivizing traditional artists to enter, supporting art asset RWA issuance, promoting ecosystem cooperation, and creator growth rewards.

Ultiland states that the ART FUND is expected to support over 100,000 artists entering the space, over 20,000 art asset issuances, and promote the Web3 transformation of global cultural content in a more standardized way.

Once the underlying products are launched, case validation appears, and supply-side resources are in place, the ecosystem begins to expand outward. Art is just the entry point. IP licensing, film and music content, performances and fan economies, and even the influence rights of creators themselves can theoretically be split, mapped, and traded under a similar framework. Cultural production in reality is accelerating, and the number of creators is increasing, but the existing distribution structure is still concentrated in platforms and a few leading institutions, with the vast majority of content unable to settle as tradable assets. Standardized on-chain issuance tools, if combined with sufficiently clear rights design, have the opportunity to bring this long-accumulated value into a more transparent market environment.

The financialization of cultural assets is poised to become the next RWA cycle, not because the concept is novel, but due to differences in underlying drivers. Financial RWAs are more constrained by interest rates, regulatory frameworks, and the pace of institutional balance sheet expansion, with marginal growth highly dependent on the macro environment; the expansion of cultural assets relies more on content supply and user time, with a growth logic closer to the internet traffic market. Once attention forms a measurable and distributable structure on-chain, it lays the foundation for conversion into assets. The crypto market itself is driven by high-frequency narratives and high-density participation, and cultural assets are a better fit for this characteristic than traditional debt or real estate assets, giving cultural RWAs the opportunity to form another growth curve on the same infrastructure.

In this track, Ultiland is discussed as a potential unicorn mainly because the cultural RWA market currently lacks a practical product system. Most projects remain at the conceptual or single-function level and have not yet formed a closed loop of “issuance—confirmation—trading—value feedback.” Ultiland has already formed a preliminary structure in mechanism, asset issuance, user participation, and supply-side resources, and has obtained real market validation through EMQL. For a newly emerging market, platforms that can provide replicable models and empirical data naturally become the focus of industry observers.

Summary

According to a report jointly released by Art Basel and UBS, the global art market is expected to reach $7.5 billion by 2025. Innovations such as NFT and RWA enable artists, collectors, and stakeholders to view art both as a cultural product and as a financial instrument. Ultiland’s position on this path depends on whether it can continue to organize high-quality cultural asset supply, maintain a clear value recovery mechanism for both creators and investors, and keep the token model stable through multiple market cycles. If asset issuance can expand from single artworks to IP, entertainment, and the creator economy, the platform will gradually shift from being a project party to an infrastructure provider at the asset layer. Conversely, if the asset side remains limited to a few targets or the token cycle relies too heavily on real income, the infrastructure narrative will weaken.

In the future, the on-chain transformation of cultural assets will not replace financial RWAs, but is more likely to run in parallel, forming two asset classes with different risk-return characteristics. The former is more volatile but highly related to user participation; the latter has stable returns but is more friendly to institutions. What Ultiland is currently doing is building a platform on the cultural asset side that can accommodate large-scale experimentation. If, in the next few years, a relatively mature cultural RWA sector emerges in the market, then today’s projects of this kind are likely to be seen as prototypes of early infrastructure.