Trust is harder to write than code—Chesky’s words hit the core of RWA: no matter how fancy it is on-chain, it’s better if the custodian makes people feel secure enough to sleep at night.

Wu Says learned that Airbnb co-founder Brian Chesky said that most of what is happening in the current RWA tokenization space is still noise, but the underlying changes are real. Its core value is not the token or the blockchain itself, but reducing friction in asset ownership—so that real estate, bonds, and funds can be split, held, settled in seconds, and traded around the clock. Chesky believes the biggest challenge in getting RWA to work in practice is not technology, but whether the market believes the platform truly holds the underlying assets. In the end, what wins won’t be the projects that “make the best tokens,” but the ones with the most trusted asset holding and verification parties.