ARIQO debuts at SEABW, details Vault-to-DEX RWA plan

ARIQO made its first public appearance at Southeast Asia Blockchain Week in Bangkok on May 21, hosting a private evening event titled Alpha After Dark with Canton Foundation, Viva Republica (Toss), BitGo, Bitkub Exchange and BLOCKSTREET. The gathering ran from 8 p.m. to midnight and brought together institutional investors, liquidity providers and protocol teams.

At the event, ARIQO presented a three-phase product roadmap for tokenized real-world assets (RWA) that begins with a Vault scheduled to open in Q3 and ends with a native perpetuals exchange. The company also announced a token generation event for $AQV planned for the second half of 2026.

Participants focused on three recurring challenges in RWA markets: a gap between rising institutional demand and current on-chain custody and trading infrastructure; the liquidity bootstrap problem many decentralized exchanges face; and the standards institutional capital requires, including clear yield mechanics, audited smart contracts and predictable capital management.

The first phase, the Vault, will operate multiple stablecoin vaults with different risk-return profiles. ARIQO described the Vault’s purpose as building a reliable capital base measured by total value locked (TVL) rather than competing on headline annual percentage yields.

The second phase, called the Terminal, is a trade-aggregation layer that connects users’ existing exchange activity to ARIQO’s interface. Trades routed through venues such as Binance and OKX would be optimized for rebates and have proceeds automatically reinvested into the Vault. ARIQO presented the Terminal as a way to capture external trading flow without launching a new centralized venue.

The final phase is a native RWA perpetuals exchange built on an orderbook model. The RWA Perp DEX is planned to list crypto, commodities, indices and synthetic real-world assets. ARIQO said the exchange will launch only after the Vault has accumulated sufficient TVL and the Terminal has attracted an active trader base. Fee revenue from the DEX is intended to support $AQV buybacks and flow back to the Vault.

Present in Bangkok were co-founders and senior leaders including CBO Emanuel Escobar Duro, COO Jin Tang, CTO Julius Nielsen and CSO Daniel J. Aldridge. Earlier on the conference floor, Escobar Duro discussed institutional capital moving on-chain and questioned which platforms have the infrastructure to receive that capital.

The ARIQO team summarized their sequencing principle as “Capital first. Flow second. Native market last.” The company directs interested parties to its website for official information and a waitlist.