RWA: Building a New World of Public Ledgers for Real Assets

Recently, many institutions and projects have been making strides in the RWA sector. The current RWA market size has reached $36.5 billion, with a year-on-year growth rate of approximately 60%. Despite facing numerous challenges, RWA is expected to become an important bridge linking traditional finance and the crypto world, supported by the entry of traditional financial giants and policies from various countries.

1. Market Dynamics and Key Events

The market size continues to expand.

As of April 21, 2025, the total market value of the RWA market is $36.5 billion, with a 24-hour growth of 0.7%. There are over 185 related crypto tokens, with a total market value of $10.62 billion, a year-on-year growth of 61%. Traditional financial giants such as BlackRock and JPMorgan are actively positioning themselves, and it is expected that the scale will exceed the trillion-dollar mark in the next five years.

Regulatory compliance is progressing steadily

Mantra Chain has obtained the VASP license from VARA in Dubai, becoming the first DeFi platform to receive this license. The project is collaborating with real estate developer Damac to tokenize $1 billion worth of assets.

Continuous emergence of technological innovations

Quant Network has launched the Overledger system supporting multi-chain applications, enhancing RWA cross-chain liquidity. Securitize has introduced the sToken Vault feature, improving the liquidity and composability of RWA.

Hong Kong and China are poised for action.

Conflux Network collaborates with Ant Group to promote RWA growth in Hong Kong. The Hong Kong Monetary Authority has launched a digital bond grant scheme and the Project Ensemble sandbox initiative. China Pacific Insurance issues a tokenized US dollar money market fund on HashKey Chain.

2. Industry Observation and Reflection

Current Development Dilemma

1. Regulatory Uncertainty: The lack of a unified global regulatory framework affects the promotion of RWA and compliance costs.

2. Barriers to adoption: The user base is limited, primarily consisting of institutions, with low participation from retail investors.

3. Sustainability and Volatility: Tokenization may lead to excessive speculation, affecting long-term investment confidence.

4. Technical challenges: The security of smart contracts and the scalability issues of blockchain still need to be addressed.

5. Liquidity issues: Some RWA assets still face insufficient liquidity after being tokenized.

6. Investor confidence: Lack of transparency, security, and regulatory compliance may undermine confidence.

Future Development Direction

1. Combining pre-regulation of centralized on-chain with post-circulation of decentralized on-chain.

2. Activate the vitality of the secondary market by breaking the barriers between institutions and retail investors through a distributed digital identity (DID) system.

3. RWA will promote the dual development of traditional finance tokenization and cryptocurrency traditionalization, achieving a value support for the crypto world.

In the future, RWA is expected to build a boundaryless world on a public ledger of real assets, reshaping the global financial landscape. However, achieving this vision still requires the joint efforts of all parties, continuously making breakthroughs in regulation, technology, and market applications.