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In the past two years, the concept of RWA has been highly popular—tokenizing bonds, digitizing real estate, securitizing fund shares. These all sound like they are going to completely overhaul the financial system. But when you break down these projects and look closely, most of them are actually stuck at the most basic level: just turning assets into tokens.
The problem is, issuing tokens is not technically difficult; the real challenge is ensuring that these tokens can survive and operate within the existing financial system.
The complexity of real-world assets is fundamentally not about the assets themselves, but about the entire set of rules and frameworks surrounding them. Who can hold them, whether they can be transferred, who they can be transferred to for compliance, how to handle disputes and responsibilities—these aspects have long been embedded into laws, contractual clauses, and regulatory procedures. When RWA goes on-chain, it appears to be asset digitization on the surface, but essentially, it requires the entire rule system, identity verification, and responsibility delineation to be fully transferred onto the blockchain for execution. If the underlying public chain does not support these features, relying solely on smart contracts to "hard-code" these rules will inevitably lead to problems.
This also explains why many RWA projects eventually go silent. Public chains are inherently open and anonymous in their account design; tokens can theoretically be received and traded by anyone. This is fine in DeFi and NFT scenarios, but it becomes a major Achilles' heel when dealing with securities assets. How to restrict transfers? How to verify qualified investors? During regulatory audits, do on-chain data count as legally valid evidence? If these issues are not addressed, RWA can only remain at the demonstration stage.
The value of some projects lies precisely in these "unspeakable" details. They do not treat RWA as a trending story, but as a comprehensive financial system engineering project. By embedding identity verification, compliance checks, and auditable privacy mechanisms at Layer 1, these solutions make asset transfer logic no longer just about "whether it can be done," but about "whether it should be done and if it complies." This design approach aligns more closely with the real requirements of traditional securities systems, rather than the free-flowing logic typical in the crypto space.
Especially in the niche of security tokens, the differences are amplified infinitely. Securities are not NFTs or governance tokens; they inherently carry legal attributes. A reliable solution is not just providing a token issuance tool, but offering an execution environment that can embed regulatory rules. It should allow regulators to see what they need to see, while market participants who shouldn’t be exposed remain hidden, and the entire asset chain remains traceable. This is the true infrastructure that RWA needs.