RWA Blockchain Converge Turns to Arbitrum and Celestia for High Speeds, Low Costs

DeFi protocol Ethena and real-world asset (RWA) tokenization firm Securitize have chosen Arbitrum and Celestia to power their new Converge blockchain.

Ethena and Securitize plan to move their tokenized asset products onto Converge once the Layer 1 blockchain launches its mainnet. The institutional-focused blockchain requires high speed and security to attract institutional clients with billions in real-world assets (RWA) to tokenize.

To achieve this, Ethena and Securitize will use Arbitrum’s high-performance Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) while leveraging Celestia for data availability.

“Converge will be highly performant from day one, powered by a custom implementation of Conduit's G2 sequencer with Arbitrum underneath,” Converge said in an X post. “From launch, Converge will have 100ms blocktimes and up to 100 Mgas/s max throughput.”

These numbers should improve dramatically within the year, with the goal of 50ms blocktimes and Gigagas/s throughput, it said.

This will be paired with Celestia’s extremely low storage costs, with even state-intensive transactions that require more time and computational power to process coming in at sub-cent levels, Converge said.

The blockchain will use Ethena’s ENA token for staking and USDe and USDtb for gas.

Converge will be permissionless, with the ability to make DApps permissioned if desired. Permissioning will allow certain applications and smart contract functions to be limited to whitelisted parties for institutional clients.

Ethena's USDe is the fourth-largest stablecoin with a market capitalization of $4.8 billion, according to Coingecko.

Securitize has issued $3.3 billion in assets onchain, the largest being BlackRock’s BUIDL, the largest tokenized U.S. treasuries fund at $2.45 billion, it said in a release.