When will the RWA narrative truly shift from "track mapping" to "transaction logic"?

After Wall Street giants such as BlackRock and Franklin Templeton entered the market one after another, the answer to this question seemed to remain unresolved until a key variable emerged - the potential entry of Nasdaq, which will undoubtedly step on the accelerator for this profound narrative iteration.

Against this backdrop, RWA has reached a subtle turning point. The past approach of focusing on “asset mapping” has become fatigued, while the new paradigm of “on-chain native usage” and “composable transactions” is becoming the focus of competition. When asset chain-linking itself is no longer a problem, the real challenge lies in: who can take over the “last mile” of on-chain transactions?

With this question in mind, we had an in-depth conversation with Jack, the head of the FufutureDAO Foundation. In his opinion, the key to success or failure of RWA lies not in the order of issuance, but in the transaction itself.

The real show will only begin after Nasdaq personally enters the market.

1. The Conflict between “Old Assets” and the “New World”

1. This year, with the entry of major TradFi giants and the latest SEC statement, RWA has become a focus of industry attention. What are your thoughts on this wave of enthusiasm? Are there any industry misunderstandings or confusions?

Jack: I think the biggest misunderstanding right now is equating the act of "on-chaining assets" with the ultimate value of RWA. Many people believe that simply turning a stock or bond into a token completes the RWA revolution. This is essentially still using Web 2's "reflection thinking," treating the blockchain as merely a decentralized database.

This approach overlooks fundamental issues: how to unlock liquidity once assets are on-chain? How to establish an efficient market-making mechanism? How to enable cross-asset portfolio trading? If these underlying trading logic issues are not addressed, the so-called "on-chain RWA" will be nothing more than a depleted, liquidity-depleted voucher in a wallet, essentially no different from its status in a traditional brokerage account.

Therefore, we are not only seeing the current attempts at RWA tokenization of stablecoins and US stocks, but we should also foresee that in the future, mainstream financial assets such as commodities, real estate, and even carbon credits will require a new set of on-chain transaction paradigms to carry them. This is where the trillion-dollar scale really lies.

2. Many people consider compliance to be the biggest obstacle for RWA. You seem to believe there are deeper bottlenecks?

Jack: Compliance is a barrier to entry, but it's not the sole determinant of success or failure. Even if all compliance hurdles are overcome, the RWA sector still faces a more fundamental bottleneck: the fundamental conflict between the inefficiency and opacity of traditional financial assets and the efficiency and transparency inherent in the blockchain world.

For example, the clearing and delivery of a US stock requires T+1, while on-chain transactions are atomic and available 24/7. How can this mismatch between time and efficiency be bridged? These are deep-seated structural contradictions that require a completely new infrastructure design.

Therefore, I have always emphasized that the success of RWA does not lie in "on-chain" itself, but in whether we can use the characteristics of blockchain to create "killer applications" for these old assets that cannot be achieved in the traditional financial system. This is the source of all value.

3. This point of view is very interesting. Does it also explain why we have not seen a "killer" application like Aave or Uniswap in this wave of RWA?

Jack: Yes, the fundamental reason lies in the huge gap between "asset on-chain" and "asset tradability." The success of Aave and Uniswap is due to their creation of a new and efficient "trading language" and "lending language" tailored for crypto-native assets (which are inherently 24/7 and have no historical baggage).

But now we try to use this language designed for crypto-native assets to describe a stock that has opening and closing times, a complex liquidation process, and a price anchored off-chain. The result is naturally "not suitable for the local environment."

In other words, the current mainstream DeFi infrastructure, especially AMMs, is designed for crypto-native assets with ambiguous price discovery mechanisms and high volatility. However, RWAs, such as Tesla stock, have an authoritative public market price on the Nasdaq. You can't use AMMs to "discover" their price; you can only "track" it.

Using the wrong tools to solve a problem will naturally not produce a real network effect. Therefore, the real proposition is not to simply throw RWA assets into the existing DeFi Lego, but to design a new, native trading logic and infrastructure for RWA assets.

2. How to Prepare for RWA’s “Nasdaq Moment”

1. What kind of disruptive impact might Nasdaq’s recent move to issue tokenized stocks have on the existing RWA landscape?

Jack: I think this will not be a shock, but more like a "singularity event" that will completely clarify the current chaotic situation in the RWA market.

First, all previous debates about the compliance of RWA issuers will naturally end when Nasdaq issues the first native chain stock, because it is the top liquidity pool and trust source of the global financial system, and the standards it defines are the final standards.

More importantly, it may completely reconstruct the value chain under the RWA narrative. The survival space of protocols such as Ondo Finance that focus on issuance and underwriting may be severely squeezed - because once the "source" of the asset can be directly on the chain, the value of any intermediate link will be weakened. Needless to say, compared to the dazzling array of tokenized RWA assets such as xxTSLA on the market, everyone will definitely prefer to directly integrate the most liquid and credible native assets issued by Nasdaq.

This presents a historic opportunity for downstream protocols. Decentralized protocols and compliant exchanges that are close to downstream traffic entry points and build trading capabilities around on-chain composability, such as on-chain protocols like OSL/HashKey or Fufuture, are likely to be the ones to truly reap the benefits.

We can understand this change as the "container moment" for RWAs. Looking back at the history of global trade, before the advent of standard containers, global freight consisted of countless inefficient packages of varying sizes (much like the various ALT assets currently flooding the blockchain). The establishment of a unified global standard for containers catalyzed the emergence of modern global supply chains and automated ports. Once Nasdaq RWAs US stocks, it will provide a standard for "value containers." The market will quickly eliminate those "junk packages" with unattractive packaging and inconsistent standards, unleashing a massive demand for standardized new configurations and trading opportunities.

Agreements like ours are positioned to provide automated ports and global trading networks for these "value containers," becoming the core hub of the new order.

2. Many people have mentioned that the existing DeFi infrastructure is not suitable for RWA assets. Can you analyze it more deeply from the underlying logic? For example, what is the core flaw of Uniswap's AMM model?

Jack: First, it's important to clarify that the AMM mechanism was a revolutionary innovation in the early days of DeFi. It elegantly solved the cold-start liquidity issues of countless long-tail assets in a permissionless manner, and its historical significance is unquestionable. However, its design philosophy dictates that it's unsuitable for asset classes like RWAs. This is a fundamental mismatch between tool and task.

For RWA, the core flaw of AMM lies in its "price discovery mechanism". It passively "calculates" the price through the relative quantities of two assets in a closed liquidity pool. This is feasible for crypto-native assets that have no real anchor point off-chain - in many scenarios, the price in the pool is a true reflection of the market price.

But RWA, such as tokenized Tesla stock, has an absolutely authoritative public market price on Nasdaq that is updated every second, at least in the medium and short term. This price is the "cause", and the price of on-chain transactions must be the "effect". The AMM mechanism is not only unable to actively follow this price, but will deviate due to any on-chain transactions, thereby providing arbitrageurs with a constant and almost risk-free attack space, and making liquidity providers (LPs) bear almost 100% of the impermanent loss.

Therefore, I believe that any attempt to achieve this through simple modifications, such as adjusting the curve or adding fee tiers, is only a temporary solution. RWA requires a completely new trading structure: it must be able to obtain prices from an external authoritative source (Oracle) efficiently and at low cost, and use this price as an "anchor". Then, around this anchor point, it can efficiently match liquidity and complete transactions through a combination of an order book and RFQ (quote-driven) model that is closer to the order book.

In a nutshell, its core should no longer be "discovering" prices, but "responding" to prices.

3. Since the value of the issuer will be weakened, beyond the concept of asset chain itself, in which field is RWA's first "killer application" most likely to appear?

Jack: The first killer application must be to use RWA as native collateral for global, 24/7 derivatives trading. This solves the core pain points of asset fragmentation and limited trading time in traditional finance.

Imagine an Asian investor using their tokenized Apple stock as margin on a weekend night to open a long position in a Bitcoin perpetual swap. This scenario is completely impossible in traditional finance, requiring complex liquidations across time zones, markets, and instruments. But on-chain, all of this can be accomplished instantly through smart contracts. This is true value creation.

In fact, this is also the core idea of Fufuture's current product - supporting users to use various financial assets as a unified margin to trade BTC, ETH and even any mainstream financial assets in the world in the future. In the future, it also plans to launch a spot trading market designed specifically for RWA to completely open up the entire link from spot holding to derivatives trading.

III. Defining a New RWA Syntax: The Dawn of Downstream Transaction Applications

1. Having discussed so many challenges, could you, based on Fufuture’s thinking and implementation practices, discuss the key technical and market challenges of using stock-type RWA assets on the chain?

Jack: The biggest challenge lies in risk control and liquidation mechanisms. For example, traditional stock markets have trading hours, while crypto derivatives present risks 24/7. We had to design a completely new, hybrid risk control engine that could handle price gaps during off-hours while ensuring timely and efficient on-chain liquidation.

In addition, the challenge in the market is to guide users to understand and accept this new paradigm. In fact, Fufuture's product design concept is "asset agnostic", that is, the underlying risk control and liquidation logic of our infrastructure is not limited to US stocks. In the future, it can be seamlessly expanded to a wider range of RWA asset categories such as tokenized gold, crude oil, government bonds and even carbon credits, paving the way for this greater future.

2. Regarding the upcoming RWA "Nasdaq moment," how will traditional resources and experience be integrated into on-chain business logic? Is it simply channel cooperation, or is there deeper business collaboration?

Jack: It goes beyond just channel collaboration; it's about deeper business collaboration. For example, we're currently exploring collaborations with some Web 2 technology giants. This isn't just about acquiring traffic, but also about jointly exploring efficient identity verification (KYC) and fund deposit and withdrawal solutions within a compliant framework.

When massive traditional users and funds want to enter this new world, whoever can provide the safest and smoothest bridge will take the initiative.

3. Looking ahead to the end of 2025, what will the RWA market look like 18 months from now? Which concepts we're all discussing today will be disproven, and what new breakthroughs will emerge that we haven't yet noticed?

Jack: I think there will be several significant changes:

First, the craze of "everything can be issued as RWA" will be falsified, and asset issuance will be highly concentrated in a few giants with top credit, and small and beautiful issuance agreements will find it difficult to survive.

Second, the biggest breakthrough will be in cross-asset composability. We will see the birth of the first truly universal on-chain trading account, where users can use tokenized real estate equity as collateral to trade commodity futures, with all risks and positions netted within the same protocol. This is the ultimate appeal of DeFi.

Third, the narrative center of RWA will completely shift from the "asset side" to the "application side". The market's focus will no longer be on who has moved what onto the chain, but on who can use these assets to create the most amazing financial gameplay.

Conclusion

There is an unspoken consensus that the entire industry is actually waiting for the "creators" of the global financial system, such as Nasdaq and the New York Stock Exchange, to make that decisive move.

Because their entry will completely end the discussion about "what RWA is" and open a new chapter of "what it can do". This also forces us to face a reality: RWA is not just an innovation of the technology stack, it is also a deep reconstruction of financial structure and behavioral logic.

It is under this expectation that RWA's "infrastructure narrative" is irreversibly replacing the "mapping narrative".

And the phrase we are already familiar with, "Going on the chain is just the first step, transactions are the language", has finally changed from a slogan to a test question that requires a serious answer.