After years of navigating the crypto space, witnessing countless boom and bust cycles, the RWA track is indeed somewhat special. It’s not the kind of explosive surge that burns out within a month. More like a slow simmer, brewing since 2022, with its popularity steadily rising.

The strange part is—RWA project funding news keeps popping up, yet truly operational applications are few and far between. What’s going on?

I’ve talked with several friends working on RWA, and they all point to the same bottleneck: how to bring off-chain asset data onto the chain and verify it. It seems like a technical issue, but in reality, it’s choking the entire industry.

Take a concrete example: tokenizing a property worth five million USD. What needs to be done? First, prove the property exists; second, verify the valuation is accurate; third, confirm clear and dispute-free ownership; finally, ensure each token corresponds one-to-one with the physical asset. Each step involves massive amounts of off-chain data.

What’s the traditional approach? An audit firm issues a report, uploads the PDF to IPFS, then records the hash on the chain. It seems straightforward, but the problems are huge—manual reports can be falsified, PDFs can be forged, and this kind of verification is static. Auditing once a month—how to dynamically monitor the property’s value over the remaining thirty days? No one manages that.

There’s also an even more headache-inducing issue. Different types of RWA assets require vastly different data formats. Real estate needs title deeds, bonds need repayment records, artworks need appraisal certificates—each category’s verification logic is completely different. This results in no unified solution; every project has to build its own framework, and the efficiency is as low as you can imagine.