New York is a city full of intense emotions.

I saw a few people sitting on the car roof, excited beyond words. I asked: Why not sit inside the car? My friend said, because it's not their car. She also said, "If the Knicks win, I’ll go climb a traffic light! 🚥"
And it turned out the Knicks really won!
The person telling me this is a friend who has a green card in New York, lives in New Jersey, commutes across the river to Manhattan every day, and works at Bloomberg headquarters.
Recently, she’s preparing to change jobs. I asked what kind of job she’s looking for? She thought for a moment and said she still wants a job with a sense of achievement. She’ll look slowly, but not too slowly.
She’s a programmer, and she said that interviews now are very different from before. In the past, just brushing LeetCode was enough, but now a bunch of AI is involved. So she’s not exactly sure how the specific tests will be, but it’s not about copying and pasting questions to AI and letting it answer.
The same question given to AI requires a person to judge when to intervene, because AI is very likely to make mistakes.
Meta was the first to launch AI-enabled programming interviews, later Amazon and Canva also changed their testing methods. Being able to recite algorithms is no longer important.
How to use AI, when to trust it, when to correct it, and whether you can spot bugs in the code it writes—that’s the real skill. Copy-pasting large chunks of unreviewed AI output is obviously a deduction.
Everyone now uses AI Agents, but for the same problem, some solve it with a few thousand tokens, while others burn tens of thousands and still get nowhere. The gap between them is just pure resource waste.
“Token efficiency” is the core competitive advantage. I estimate that in the future, product and technology roles will merge into one.
She doesn’t dare to gap too long, because the situation six months from now might be completely different from now.
On the way back to the hotel, I saw an ad for CBRE. Suddenly I thought, isn’t this RWA?
CBRE is the world’s largest commercial real estate services company, but it only does asset management and brokerage, not holding properties itself. Instead, it allows institutions or retail investors to contribute money to participate in purchasing, then distributes rental income as interest based on shares.
In the crypto industry, RWA means that by buying a token, you indirectly hold a small part of a building, and rent is paid to you daily in USDC. The token can be traded 24/7. A building worth $1 million can be divided into 20k tokens, each worth $50.
BlackRock is also involved; they have tokenized government bonds, totaling about $2.5 billion. RWA isn’t limited to real estate; it also includes government bonds, loans, and gold, all on-chain.
But liquidity has always been easier to talk about than to actually achieve.
Blackstone has a non-listed real estate trust called BREIT, with a peak net asset value of about $68 billion. By the end of 2022, too many investors wanted to redeem simultaneously, and Blackstone had to limit redemptions proportionally for 15 months. This is exactly the same situation as DeFi runs on a bank run. It’s also a difficult problem that RWA claims to solve but hasn’t truly solved.
Parcl is even more aggressive.
It doesn’t let you hold any specific building directly. Instead, it creates tradable derivatives based on a city’s housing price index, allowing you to go long or short on, for example, “San Francisco per square foot housing prices,” with up to 10x leverage.
In January 2026, Polymarket partnered with Parcl to connect housing price indices to prediction markets, allowing you to buy and sell the rise or fall of housing prices in San Francisco, New York, Miami… over a certain period.
Why are some people willing to bet on falling house prices?
During the pandemic years, some bought office buildings in San Francisco and New York, but couldn’t rent them out, losing a lot of money, with some nearly defaulting.
San Francisco’s vacancy rate is approaching 40% in 2024. Ordinary office buildings have fallen about 70% from their 2019 peak. Market Street 995, valued at $62 million in 2016, was auctioned off in 2024 for only $650,000, a 90% drop.
Broadway 1740 in New York, bought by Blackstone in 2014 for $605 million, was sold in 2024 for $185 million, a 70% discount. It’s estimated that remote work has wiped out $556.8 billion in market value of office buildings across the U.S.
Finally, all of this circles back to one word: compliance.
A friend who has been in the US for ten years told me that the biggest problem in the financial industry is compliance.
Regulators tend to assume all financial innovations are illegal at first. He said regulators don’t care how much money the people making money can earn, but they are extremely afraid of ordinary people’s deposits being mishandled because the US suffered huge losses during the 2008 financial crisis!
I don’t entirely agree with him.
I saw an ad for Polymarket on Times Square, with the World Cup odds displayed on the screen. It was fined by CFTC in 2022 and kicked out of the US market, but later it spent $112 million to acquire a licensed exchange, and by November 25, 2025, it received a formal CFTC license.
Later, even ICE, the parent company of the NYSE, invested $2 billion in it.
So, the US is maintaining the bottom line of the “GENIUS Act,” not allowing stablecoins to pay interest or offer deposit insurance, while also opening compliant channels to tokenize assets and develop prediction markets.
Regulators aim to protect ordinary people’s deposits but haven’t stifled innovation.