Just caught something interesting from Paris Blockchain Week that's worth thinking about. There's this persistent myth floating around that simply putting illiquid assets onchain automatically makes them tradeable. Spoiler alert: it doesn't work that way.

Oya Celiktemur from Ondo Finance was pretty direct about this. She pointed out that real estate and private credit were never that liquid to begin with, so slapping them on a blockchain doesn't magically change their nature. Francesco Ranieri Fabracci from Tether echoed the same reality check - putting an asset onchain doesn't guarantee liquidity. According to him, only a narrower band of instruments like bonds, money market funds and stablecoins actually tend to achieve consistent liquidity in tokenized markets.

What's actually happening in the real estate tokenization space tells the story pretty well. The broader RWA market has been growing like crazy - jumped from $8.8 billion to nearly $30 billion in just one year. Sounds massive, right? But here's the catch: most of that growth came from already-liquid stuff like tokenized US Treasuries and commodities. Real estate tokenization? That went from $35 million to $296 million. Private equity moved from $60 million to $223 million. Strong percentage gains, sure, but still a tiny slice of the overall market.

This actually matters more than people realize. The real estate tokenization sector keeps expanding in terms of issuance, but secondary market activity is still pretty thin. You can have tons of outstanding tokenized assets without having any actual trading happening. That's the gap everyone's trying to figure out - how do you move from just issuing more tokens to actually building real liquidity? It's a totally different challenge than most people expected when they first got hyped about RWA.