I just took a quick look around and found that the discussion about RWA on-chain is heating up again. To be honest, I’ve been a bit conflicted about this direction for a while. Recently, in a few communities, people are still arguing about the compliance boundaries of privacy coins and mixers, while on the RWA side, they’re already talking up “trillions in liquidity.”

I originally thought RWA was the best combination of crypto and real-world assets, but after giving it some careful thought, I realized that the liquidity in many projects is, in fact, an illusion. For example, if you tokenize a house, it looks like you can trade it 24/7—but once you write in the redemption terms, when it actually comes time to cash out, you may have to go through it for a few months, or even rely on market depth to support it. Isn’t that basically the same as lock-up periods in traditional assets?

There’s even a project I looked into where I read its whitepaper. At first, I thought the mechanism sounded quite great, but later I found that the redemption process hides a few vague phrases like “mutual agreement” for a “negotiated resolution”… Let’s put it politely: the pie-in-the-sky just isn’t drawn all that cleanly.

Anyway, I’ll pay closer attention to these terms going forward. I’d rather move slower than get trapped in a pool that pretends to be liquid. Rational discussion is welcome.