#Gate广场中秋团圆局 #市场观察 Look to RWA in the fifth bull-market cycle!
Before each major bull market in crypto arrives, market participants seek answers to two core questions.
First, where will the incremental capital for the next bull market come from?
Second, what new application paradigm will support continued gains throughout the bull market?
In past cycles, many players captured the benefits of Bitcoin, Ethereum, and DeFi, while many other participants suffered heavy losses at the end of the cycle because the underlying assets had no real cash flow and were hit hard during rate-hike cycles. History has proven that markets relying solely on native on-chain assets are highly dependent on loose liquidity conditions. Once monetary policy tightens, assets lacking support from real returns can collapse rapidly. So, is there a solution that can bring real-world cash flow onto the blockchain and address the crypto industry's long-standing lack of real returns? The research team proposes that the main theme of the fifth crypto cycle is RWA, or the tokenization of real-world assets. RWA is not a short-term speculative concept; it seeks to bridge the gap between traditional finance and on-chain DeFi.
Review of the crypto market's four historical cycles: every bull market requires the resonance of loose liquidity and paradigm innovation.
The research team puts forward a core argument: a major crypto bull market must satisfy both monetary easing and paradigm innovation, while new use cases determine how broadly the market rally can spread. The industry has gone through four complete cycles to date.
The first cycle was from 2011 to 2015, the store-of-value cycle. Its representative assets were Bitcoin and Litecoin. During this stage, blockchain was positioned as digital gold and peer-to-peer electronic cash. The industry's goal was to prove that digital assets could be used to store value. Use cases were limited and centered solely on store-of-value functions.
The second cycle was from 2016 to 2018, the public-chain infrastructure cycle. Projects such as Ethereum and EOS proposed the concept of a world computer and built the underlying infrastructure for smart contracts. Infrastructure was developed rapidly during this stage, but mature on-chain applications were scarce. Many projects relied on financing and speculation, lacked stable cash flow, and ultimately saw their bubbles burst at the end of the cycle.
The third cycle was from 2019 to 2022, the DeFi cycle. Decentralized exchanges, lending, and algorithmic liquidity products erupted simultaneously. DeFi established a financial system on-chain, but the assets of most DeFi projects were native on-chain tokens, with no real-world cash flow underlying them. When the Federal Reserve entered a rate-hike cycle and liquidity tightened, the funding chains of many DeFi projects lacking real returns broke down, triggering collapses.
The fourth cycle was from 2023 to 2025, the institutional-entry cycle. Spot Bitcoin ETFs were launched, opening a channel for traditional institutional capital to enter the crypto market. Market rotation themes included Meme coins, BTCFi, and on-chain AI. However, this cycle only solved the problem of channels for capital to enter the market; it did not produce a large-scale, sustainable new application paradigm, and the use cases for new assets remained limited.
The common thread across the four cycles is that, in the first four cycles, asset value was largely confined to the crypto-native world. DeFi can support lending and trading, but its collateral is mostly crypto tokens whose value is highly volatile. Once the macro monetary environment tightens, the entire ecosystem lacks external real-world cash flow to provide a hedge. This is the fundamental reason why the previous bull markets lacked staying power.
Based on this history, the research team believes that the fifth cycle, beginning in 2026, will center on RWA and DeFi 3.0. The core logic of RWA is to bring real-world assets onto the blockchain in tokenized form, allowing DeFi protocols to connect with the stable cash flow generated by real-world assets and usher in a DeFi renaissance.
The definition and market size of RWA, and why institutions believe RWA has the potential to drive a paradigm shift
RWA stands for the tokenization of real-world assets. Simply put, bonds, gold, real estate, corporate credit, commodities, and other real-world assets are mapped into tokens on the blockchain through compliant legal structures, custodial arrangements, and auditing mechanisms. The tokens represent partial rights to the corresponding real-world assets, while the underlying assets themselves continue to generate cash flow, such as bond interest, rental income, and loan interest.
According to data disclosed at the event, the total on-chain RWA market is currently close to $40 billion, with the market expected to grow by 50% to 60% during 2026.
There are three core drivers behind the sector's growth.
First, it addresses DeFi's biggest weakness. Traditional DeFi relies on crypto-native assets and has no external cash flow. RWA brings the stable returns of real-world assets on-chain, allowing DeFi to move beyond circular games between tokens and capture returns from traditional financial assets.
Second, it lowers the barriers to trading traditional assets. Ordinary people face extremely high barriers to participating in traditional bonds, commercial real estate, and private credit, while these assets also have poor liquidity. After tokenization, assets can be divided into smaller units, allowing small amounts of capital to participate. Settlement and dividend distribution can be executed automatically through smart contracts, reducing intermediary transaction costs.
Third, it opens an entry point for capital from traditional financial institutions. ETFs solved the channel for institutions to buy Bitcoin, while RWA allows banks and asset-management companies to bring the assets they manage directly onto the blockchain. Traditional finance holds tens of trillions of dollars in existing assets, creating substantial potential for tokenization.
Well-known real-world cases in which RWA has already been implemented.
RWA is not merely a theoretical concept. Multiple asset classes have already been implemented. Below are the typical cases with the highest market recognition and publicly verifiable information.
1. Tokenized U.S. Treasuries (BlackRock BUIDL, Ondo USYC) This is currently the largest RWA category and the one with the highest level of institutional participation. BlackRock, the world's largest asset manager, launched the BUIDL tokenized U.S. Treasury fund, bringing short-term U.S. Treasuries onto the blockchain in tokenized form. Token holders can earn interest from the Treasuries. Ondo's USYC is likewise a tokenized short-term U.S. Treasury product and one of the leading U.S. Treasury RWA products by on-chain scale. The underlying assets are U.S. Treasuries, and the returns come from Treasury interest. Asset custody and auditing are handled by traditional financial institutions. These products are also the primary source of growth in the RWA sector today.
2. Tokenized gold: PAXG, XAUt. Paxos issues PAXG, while Tether issues XAUt. Each token corresponds to one troy ounce of physical gold, which is held by a third-party custodian. Users holding the tokens effectively hold a share of physical gold and can apply to redeem the physical gold. This is one of the earliest RWA products to be implemented and has the largest user base. It has been operating for years and has a large number of market holders.
3. Real estate tokenization project RealT RealT packages U.S. real estate into tokens, with the tokens representing equity in the property company. Token holders can receive stablecoin dividends from property rental income according to their holdings. The property itself is a real-world asset, and rent is recurring cash flow. Ordinary users do not need to purchase an entire property and can hold a fractional share with a small amount of capital, enabling the division of real estate assets.
4. Corporate credit RWA: Centrifuge, Goldfinch Centrifuge and Goldfinch focus on tokenizing supply-chain finance and loans to small and medium-sized enterprises. Loans taken out by small and medium-sized enterprises in the real world are tokenized and placed on-chain. On-chain users who purchase the tokens are effectively providing loans to real-world businesses, with returns coming from the interest repaid by those businesses. The underlying assets are the debts of real-world businesses, which generate real-world cash flow.
5. Domestic compliant real-asset tokenization case (Hong Kong RWA pilot) Langxin Technology and GCL Energy Technology, together with Ant Chain, implemented a photovoltaic asset RWA project. The underlying assets are power-generation revenue from photovoltaic power stations, making it a tokenization project for real-world energy assets. It is being piloted under the guidance of the Hong Kong Monetary Authority. The underlying assets are domestic real-world photovoltaic assets that generate power-generation cash flow.
In addition, there are more pilot cases, including Brazilian farms tokenizing cattle as collateral and SWIFT working with multiple major banks worldwide on cross-border settlement pilots for tokenized deposits.
Overall conclusion: Has RWA taken off, and how should we view the fifth cycle?
Considering all the facts and cases together, an objective conclusion can be reached. RWA has moved beyond the pure-concept stage and entered the stage of small-scale pilot implementation. The sector's scale, level of institutional participation, and number of implemented cases are all continuing to grow, so it can be considered to be in the early takeoff stage. However, it still has a long way to go before achieving mass adoption and becoming the market's undisputed main theme. The research team's cyclical assessment is logically sound. The previous four crypto bull markets all lacked stable cash flow from the real world. The value of RWA lies in its attempt to bring traditional finance's assets worth tens of trillions of dollars onto the blockchain, bringing incremental capital and new use cases to the crypto market and satisfying the paradigm-innovation condition required for the next bull market. But paradigm innovation also needs to be accompanied by a loose monetary environment. Without monetary easing, paradigm innovation alone cannot form a bull market. The two must resonate. The RWA sector is currently in its early stage. Positive factors include institutional participation, the implementation of pilots, and growth in asset scale; constraints include regulatory uncertainty, counterparty risk, insufficient liquidity, and the presence of numerous fraudulent pseudo-RWA projects mixed into the sector.
RWA represents a technological direction, not a guaranteed-profitable investment target. Tokenization merely changes how assets are registered and settled; it does not eliminate the credit, interest-rate, or legal risks of the underlying assets themselves. Market participants need to distinguish genuinely implemented RWA projects from false projects riding the hype and should not simply assume that any RWA is a quality asset for the next bull market.
$ONDO