Author: Liang Yu

Editor: Zhao Yidan

A diamond from Botswana is cut, certified, assigned a unique number, and then transformed into a string of code stored on the blockchain. Finally, it is purchased by a collector in Shanghai through a web link, all without the need to trust any intermediaries. This is no longer a science fiction scenario, but a reality that is happening.

By the end of 2025, as global attention focuses on macroeconomic fluctuations, architects of the crypto world have turned their sights to more solid ground. Coinbase Ventures, as an industry barometer, has placed "RWA perpetual synthetic assets" at the top of its four core tracks in its 2026 investment outlook.

This outlook reveals a profound shift: crypto technology is shedding its purely speculative guise and attempting to become a bridge connecting the trillion-dollar real economy. Almost simultaneously, statistics from the industry data platform RWA.xyz show that the total market value of tokenized real-world assets has quietly surpassed $35.96 billion.

These seemingly isolated events are like magnets scattered across the sands of time, forming a new gravitational field.

I. Undercurrents: When Financial Narratives Shift to Value Anchors

Over the past year, the clamor of the crypto market has gradually settled into a consensus: to navigate through cycles, one must find a value anchor that is more solid than the consensus itself. This collective awareness shift is clearly discernible in the layouts of top investment institutions.

According to the annual outlook report released by Coinbase Ventures in November 2025, it explicitly directs resources toward four frontiers: RWA perpetual contracts, specialized trading facilities, next-generation DeFi, and AI integration. The report analyzes that perpetual contracts provide a more "flexible and liquid" on-chain path for traditional assets compared to direct tokenization, with the potential to unlock vast markets ranging from commodities to private credit.

The market has silently responded to this judgment with data. According to real-time data from the RWA.xyz platform as of November 28, 2025, the on-chain total market value of the entire RWA ecosystem has reached a historic high of $35.96 billion. A more significant detail is that although the monthly growth rate of market value has slowed to 1.10%, the number of holder addresses has increased against the trend by 8.02%, exceeding 550,000 in total.

This means that the influx is no longer driven by funds chasing short-term hotspots, but by an increasing number of real users and long-term believers. The gentle growth of assets alongside the surge in participants paints a subtle picture of a transition from "speculative bubbles" to "user networks."

II. Cornerstone: The Silent Technological Revolution

The unfolding of any grand narrative begins with the silent upgrade of underlying infrastructure. The transformation of RWA from blueprint to reality relies not on a single magic bullet, but on a precise engineering effort driven by trading facilities, financial protocols, and smart algorithms.

First is the reshaping of trading channels. Liquidity fragmentation and market maker risks have long been the biggest technical gaps hindering institutional capital entry. In response, a new generation of trading facilities is emerging. For example, the "alternative Prop AMM" model that Coinbase Ventures focuses on builds a transparent yet secure barrier between the public market and professional market makers through clever mechanism design, ensuring both liquidity depth and protection of market-making strategies from malicious attacks. This lays the first cornerstone for bringing assets like government bonds and commodities onto the blockchain, which require stable pricing.

When trading channels are unblocked, the financial Lego blocks begin to show their magic. The core breakthrough of next-generation DeFi lies in the deepening of "composability." Imagine an investor holding a perpetual contract position for "on-chain copper futures" on platform A, where the assets deposited as collateral can simultaneously be borrowed for funds on protocol B or provide liquidity in pool C to earn returns. This cross-protocol, permissionless nesting of assets and strategies transforms static asset holdings into a dynamic value production network.

Even more disruptive is a form of "trust codification." The core of traditional finance is collateral, while next-generation DeFi is attempting to touch the holy grail of unsecured lending. According to the Federal Reserve's G.19 consumer credit report released in 2024, the size of the revolving unsecured credit market in the U.S. alone is approximately $1.3 trillion. If on-chain protocols can construct reliable on-chain credit scoring models by integrating on-chain transaction history, compliant off-chain credit data, and even behavioral patterns, it could unlock a brand new trillion-dollar market. At that time, high-credit-grade RWA assets may become the pricing anchor of this new system.

Finally, the integration of AI provides intelligent navigation for all of this. The empowerment of AI is subtle: on the development side, it can transform complex legal terms and financial logic into accurate smart contracts, lowering the innovation threshold; on the risk control side, it can monitor the health of underlying asset pools in real-time, predicting potential risks; and identity verification technologies like "proof of humanity" serve as the foundation for ensuring that on-chain asset ownership is genuine and resistant to witch hunts, firmly binding rights in the virtual world to identities in the real world.

III. Emergence: When Abstract Technology Becomes Tangible Life

When the technological building blocks are ready, transformation begins to flow from the screens of engineers into the daily lives of ordinary people. The charm of RWA lies in its ability to transform abstract economic concepts into perceivable and participatory concrete scenarios.

The most intuitive change is the significant broadening of the "horizon" in the investment world. In the past, an ordinary investor wanting to express views on "Southeast Asian logistics real estate" or "German small and medium-sized enterprise index" had almost no way to do so. RWA perpetual synthetic assets act like a combination of financial telescopes and microscopes, allowing anyone to invest in or hedge risks on segmented assets in any corner of the globe at a very low cost, 24/7. A coffee farmer in Latin America can easily hedge against euro exchange rate risks; a saver in East Asia can directly go long on synthetic assets of U.S. inflation-protected bonds. Financial democratization is beginning to take shape on a global macro scale.

A deeper revolution lies in "awakening dormant wealth." Globally, there are trillions of dollars in illiquid assets—real estate, private equity, artworks, intellectual property—like frozen wealth. Tokenization allows for the splitting of asset shares, while perpetual synthetic contracts further provide solutions for the "illusion of liquidity": the market does not need to trade actual fragments of a building, but only needs to trade a contract that tracks the price index of such assets. This provides efficient risk pricing and transfer tools for existing wealth, unleashing immeasurable capital efficiency.

Real stories are unfolding. For example, the digital asset platform RWA.LTD has deeply integrated its issued diamond tokens with internet-native payment protocols. The process for users to purchase a digital diamond is as simple as buying a book online—click, pay, confirm, and the asset goes directly to their personal crypto wallet. Each digital diamond corresponds to a physical diamond with an IGI international certificate stored in a vault. This "digital twin" experience blurs the boundaries between investment and consumption, virtual and real, heralding a new way of holding and circulating assets.

IV. Alliances: Moves and Encirclements on the Global Chessboard

The narrative of RWA has never been a victory of a single technology, but a strategic interplay unfolding on a global chessboard of regulation, capital, and technology. The prosperity of the ecosystem depends on whether multiple key dimensions can evolve in sync.

Data and oracle systems form the nervous system of this ecosystem. The discovery of asset value and the settlement of loans rely on the data flow from the real world to the blockchain every second. Future competition may not be about who can transmit data, but about who can provide more unique, resilient, and real-time data sources in specific fields, such as carbon credit prices in certain regions or real-time cash flows of certain intellectual property royalties.

All innovations ultimately need to flow within the channels of compliance. The global regulatory landscape presents an interesting mosaic. In East Asia, the Financial Services Commission of South Korea is actively promoting the revision of the "Electronic Securities Act" to provide clear legislative support for asset tokenization. In Europe, the European Central Bank has repeatedly warned in a 2024 thematic report that large-scale asset tokenization could lead to deposit outflows from the banking system, posing risks to financial stability. This tension between "encouraging innovation" and "preventing risks" will long define the survival space of the industry.

The entry of traditional financial giants adds weight to this transformation. In 2025, the global derivatives market leader CME Group announced a strategic partnership with Google Cloud, planning to launch a pilot project in 2026 to explore the tokenization of core businesses such as collateral management using distributed ledger technology. Meanwhile, one of the major financial institutions in the U.S., U.S. Bank, has also been testing its digital asset solutions on public chains, paying special attention to whether this technology can meet its stringent compliance and risk control requirements. Their steps are cautious yet firm, marking the deepening integration of "Wall Street" and "Crypto Valley."

In this increasingly multi-chain world, interoperability determines the radius of asset flow. A token representing music copyright revenue rights issued on chain A, if it can seamlessly be used as collateral in a DeFi protocol on chain B or as a premium item in a gaming ecosystem on chain C, will see its value grow exponentially due to network effects. Bridging these value islands is foundational engineering for building a global liquidity network.

V. Looking Ahead: Gazing into the Future from the Cliffs of Challenge

The road to the future is not smooth; steep ridges still stand ahead that need to be crossed. Recognizing these challenges clearly is part of any rational narrative.

First and foremost is the "last mile" issue of legal ownership. When people hold tokens representing the carbon credits of a forest, do they own a string of code or ownership protected by legal enforcement? Will the automatic execution of smart contracts be recognized in real-world courts? How can the rights to on-chain assets be enforced in the event of project bankruptcy? Until these questions are resolved, RWA is like a building erected on quicksand.

The shadows of technology and security always accompany. Vulnerabilities in smart contracts, data tampering by oracles, and attacks on cross-chain bridges—these inherent risks of the crypto world could trigger systemic shocks far beyond previous experiences when involving real assets worth billions. Security is no longer just a technical issue; it is a social responsibility.

Moreover, the undercurrents of regulatory arbitrage and geopolitical games cannot be ignored. Some regions may introduce extremely lenient "regulatory sandboxes" to attract innovation; for example, reports suggest that Uzbekistan is planning to launch a sandbox program for digital assets in 2026. While this may promote localized innovation, it could also lead to fragmented global regulatory standards, laying the groundwork for cross-border risk transmission.

Despite the numerous challenges, the forces driving the wheels of history have already accumulated. The curve of technological innovation continues to steeply rise, clearing obstacles for privacy and usability from zero-knowledge proofs to account abstraction. The ongoing influx of traditional capital and talent brings more rigorous financial engineering and risk management experience. More critically, the global economy's intrinsic demand for enhancing asset liquidity and reducing transaction friction is the most fundamental and enduring engine for this track.

We may be approaching a turning point, where a multi-layered, programmable global value internet will begin to take shape: at the base are "reserve-grade assets" backed by sovereign credit or top-tier physical assets, providing stability; the middle layer consists of a diverse array of synthetic assets and derivatives, meeting complex risk management and investment needs; at the top layer are innovative applications that integrate social, gaming, and consumption elements, allowing finance to thoroughly merge into the capillaries of digital life.

The turning of the times often begins with subtle sounds from the margins. When members of the South Korean National Assembly debate the specific wording of the "Electronic Securities Act" revision, when traders in Zurich begin to hedge risks of infrastructure projects in Africa using synthetic contracts, and when a diamond's journey from mine to wallet takes just a few clicks, these scattered fragments are quietly connected by the same network.

This network does not claim to replace the old world; it simply provides a new way of connection—more direct, more efficient, and more globalized. The future has arrived; it just has not yet been evenly distributed. The story of RWA is about how this distribution occurs and how it will reshape our entire imagination of value, property rights, and trust.

Some sources of information:

· "Coinbase Plans to Invest in RWA Perpetual Contracts, Specialized Trading Terminals, and Other Four Major Areas in 2026"

· "Which Tracks Will Coinbase Focus on in 2026?"

· "Coinbase Announces Nine Major Crypto Innovation Directions for 2026"

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