Recently there have been a whole bunch of news stories about RWA being put on-chain, as if they’re about to bring real-world assets into the blockchain to drive big liquidity. I looked into the redemption terms of several projects—most of them hide a lock-up period or offer discounted redemptions. In plain terms, the little liquidity on-chain just makes the order book look lively; when you actually need to cash out, you either have to queue or take a discount. It’s the same as how Layer2 teams constantly compare TPS and subsidies—on the surface the data looks good, but how many real users actually stick around? Either way, I’m focusing on just two things with these projects: the redemption threshold and the address retention rate. When there’s too much noise, my de-noising strategy is one sentence: turn off Twitter, pull your own node, and check on-chain data—those inflated numbers will naturally fall apart.