Forward Industries and RockawayX co-lead $5M round in onchain reinsurance startup OnRe
What's the deal? Forward Industries (NASDAQ: FWDI) and RockawayX have co-led a $5 million Series A round in OnRe, a Bermuda-licensed reinsurance company building on the Solana blockchain. Forward also plans to deploy up to $25 million into ONyc, OnRe's yield-bearing token on Solana.
OnRe is regulated under both Bermuda's Insurance Act and its Digital Asset Business Act. Its token, ONyc, gives onchain participants exposure to a diversified portfolio of underwritten reinsurance risk — an asset class traditionally reserved for large institutional allocators.
Why now? Tokenised real-world assets (RWAs) have emerged as one of the fastest-growing segments in crypto, and reinsurance represents a new frontier. Forward Industries, which calls itself "the leading Solana treasury company," sees the deal as a way to diversify beyond native staking yield into dollar-denominated, uncorrelated income streams.
"We view OnRe and ONyc as a blueprint for where institutional capital is going — real-world assets, structured and distributed on high-performance blockchains like Solana," said Ryan Navi, Forward's chief investment officer. He described the move as a step toward making Forward "the Berkshire Hathaway of Solana."
RockawayX, a global multi-strategy digital asset investment firm, said it seeded OnRe early on, validated it as an underwriter, and provided initial liquidity before scaling capital. "Watching OnRe grow from zero into a flagship RWA on Solana shows how much demand there is for new onchain yield sources," said Viktor Fischer, RockawayX's chief executive officer.
What could go wrong? Onchain reinsurance is uncharted territory. Combining two heavily regulated industries — insurance and digital assets — creates layered compliance risk. The product's success depends on sustained DeFi adoption and Solana's continued institutional traction, neither of which is guaranteed.
Forward's plan to deploy up to $25 million into a single token also concentrates risk. If reinsurance losses spike or demand for ONyc dries up, the company's treasury strategy could take a significant hit.
The signal: The deal reflects a broader trend of traditional financial products migrating onchain. Reinsurance — one of the oldest forms of institutional risk transfer — being tokenised on a high-throughput blockchain like Solana suggests the RWA wave is moving well beyond stablecoins and treasuries into more complex, higher-yield asset classes.
It also signals growing confidence in Solana as infrastructure for institutional-grade financial products, not just retail trading and memecoins.
Read more: globenewswire.com
