Investment Opportunities in the RWA Track

1. The biggest advantage of RWA lies in its liquidity and the lack of permission, such as xstock, which operates on a direct pool logic and cannot implement KYC, right?

A fundamental characteristic of RWA is the on-chain representation of physical assets. In this process, going on-chain is a formality, but the physical assets are the essence.

Once we examine physical assets, we must pay attention to the fact that they are heavily regulated in the West, especially in the United States. Being heavily regulated means that even if they are on-chain, the regulatory attributes they are subject to will eventually also go on-chain.

For example: In the United States, capital gains tax must be paid when trading stocks.

Therefore, the highly discussed tokenized trading of U.S. stocks will eventually be subject to tax regulation. The reason some exchanges or DEXs can conduct permissionless trading now is fundamentally because the trading volume is still very small. In the future, as this trading volume increases, it will definitely attract the attention of U.S. tax regulatory agencies.

Regulatory agencies only need to focus on one point to regulate tokenized stock trading: whichever institution has collateralized the tokenized stocks, that institution will be regulated. Once profits are generated from the trading of these collateralized stock tokens, the regulatory agency can require that institution to pay capital gains tax.

In this case, the institution will be forced to use various means to conduct KYC and record all profits.

Additionally, there are currently some platforms offering tokenized stocks, but the vast majority of traders do not pay attention to whether these tokens are genuinely backed by sufficient collateralized stocks. This means it is entirely possible that some platforms trading stock tokens have no underlying stocks at all, only some tokens that are supposedly "pegged" to stocks but are actually empty.

The risks involved have not yet been exposed, or will not be exposed for now, because the current scale is still very small. I believe that when it reaches a certain scale, regulatory agencies will also get involved.

In the stablecoin sector, Tether faces a similar issue: it has been criticized for whether it truly has sufficient dollar assets to back the issuance of USDT. To eliminate this doubt, it recently launched a new plan to issue stablecoins that comply with U.S. regulatory standards.

I believe that the situations listed above will eventually occur. KYC in the RWA sector will definitely become stricter. For users in mainland China, we only have disadvantages, not advantages, in terms of KYC.

In the future, even if there are RWA investments that can be participated in directly without KYC, I estimate that they will likely only be in some marginal areas and gray zones.

Therefore, I am not very optimistic about this field.

2. Is ONDO trustworthy?

I have not participated in this project, and my understanding of it is very limited.

Seeing this comment question, I want to clarify a statement: the RWA I mentioned in the article is not the broad sense of RWA, but the narrow sense of RWA.

The broad sense of RWA includes anything related to RWA, which is a very wide range. For example, Ethereum and dollar stablecoins that support the issuance of RWA assets are considered RWA. These assets are certainly important for retail investors, and they should hold them.

The narrow sense of RWA refers to some assets that could only be traded off-chain in the real world, which are now and will be mapped to the chain as tokens, allowing investors to purchase tokens on-chain. The most attractive assets in this category are stocks, unlisted equity, precious metals, real estate, etc.

When I usually say that retail investors have limited advantages and opportunities in the RWA ecosystem, I am referring to these narrow RWA.

3. Currently, the best investment opportunity for retail investors in the RWA sector is probably only the stocks of USDe, right?

My attention to the RWA sector is limited, and I cannot determine which of these is the best opportunity for retail investors.

However, if we set aside KYC and qualification restrictions, among the RWA sectors I am concerned about and have seen, my favorite remains the equity of unlisted companies; I am not very interested in other areas.

Currently, there are many excellent unlisted company equities available on some platforms for trading equity tokens, gathering companies from the U.S. in cutting-edge fields such as AI, big data, robotics, new materials, and aerospace. There will be some great opportunities among these companies, but these platforms have relatively high requirements for KYC and qualifications.

To invest in this field, it is best to have a KYC identity from another region and possess certain qualifications.