We Need to Talk About Real World Assets (RWAs)

TL;DR

• There’s a total of 12 ETF applications that have been filed, and folks believe that the SEC will approve all of them at once – so it’s not seen to be playing favorites.

• It doesn’t really matter. For two reasons.

  1. Bitcoin’s price can jump just as effectively off the back of a rumor than it can from real, verified news – and it might have (check out the header image)!

  2. Approval tomorrow, or approval next year…as long as its on its way, we’re happy.

Full Story

At the end of the day, financial markets are just monetized gossip circles.

A rumor spreads → some people place bets on the outcome → money is made/money is lost.

The crypto markets are no exception.

And right now, the crypto gossip circles are whispering three little letters:

R-W-A (Real World Assets).

So we should probably talk about them, and cover: what they are, why they’re worth getting excited about, and where they have an advantage.

1. What are they?

   RWAs are (you guessed it) real world assets, represented on a blockchain.

   E.g. buy an NFT → it gives you ownership over a home/vintage wine/watch/whatever.

2. Why are they worth getting excited about?

   RWAs aren’t new – in fact, they were around in the last bull run – but the tech and market interest wasn’t quite there yet.

   This time around it seems the market is primed for RWA adoption (at least, that’s what the market chatter suggests – folks won’t shut up about them).

   And this level of chatter/excitement often leads to investment and development.

3. Where’s the advantage?

   Speed and access makes these RWAs easier to trade, which attracts more buyers and grows the market. Imagine buying and selling a range of apartments, single family homes, and commercial properties – all individually – multiple times a day (the same way you would if you were to day trade stocks).

   That ain’t happening in the current system.

   To buy/sell a property you’d need to deal with public/private auctions, brokers, agents, lawyers etc, all over multiple days/months.

   RWAs can hyper-contract the time and effort needed to trade these physical ‘things,’ by representing ownership of each asset as a token on a blockchain – allowing folks to trade them at the speed of a crypto transaction.

…and it looks like the adoption has already begun, for example: Courtyard, a collectible card storage platform is giving away ‘tokenized mystery packs.’

I.e. Mystery packs made up of tokens that represent real Pokemon cards, which are stored with Courtyard (no packing/shipping needed).

Pretty neat!