I’ve been watching a number for a long time: 589%.

This is the growth rate of real-world assets (RWA) on the blockchain over the past year.
Stocks, bonds, money market funds... these things that originally existed in the traditional financial world are being moved onto the chain one by one.
Just the tokenization of stocks alone has increased by 422%.
When I entered the industry, "crypto" and "traditional finance" were two worlds that looked down on each other.
They thought the other was old-fashioned, and the other thought this side was a bunch of gamblers.
Now I increasingly feel that the wall between them is quietly disappearing.
It's not about who has won over whom.
It's that bonds, stocks, and cash are beginning to exist again through blockchain in a 24/7, divisible, globally accessible way.
The most profound change in crypto over these years has never been creating new coins, but rewriting the underlying rules of how old assets operate.
Interestingly, the first assets to be massively on-chain were the most boring: money market funds, government bonds.
Safe, stable, with real returns.
Perhaps this is the mark of industry maturity—when it no longer relies on the "get-rich-quick myth" to attract people, but instead retains them by "making the old world better."
The lively things come first, the solid ones come later, but often, it’s the latter that endures.