You are standing on a glass walkway that allows you to see straight into the abyss. This sense of transparency gives you the courage to keep moving forward. But what if someone suddenly told you that the steel bolts supporting this glass are actually painted cardboard disguised as metal? Would you still dare to walk?

This is the true picture of the current RWA (Real World Asset) track.

By the end of 2025, RWA has long transformed from a "grand narrative" into the infrastructure of Web3. Traditional financial giants like BlackRock and Fidelity have all entered, and the scale of on-chain government bonds, tokenized real estate, and private credit has easily surpassed hundreds of billions of dollars. It looks prosperous, but behind the scenes, "on-chain mirages" are becoming increasingly rampant.

Last week, I almost fell into a trap—a so-called RWA protocol claiming to be anchored to "Singapore prime commercial real estate" nearly cost me my lesson. In the end, I only saw through the truth after thorough verification.

The fundamental problem with RWA projects is this: severe information asymmetry. In DeFi, code is law, and everything is transparent; but in RWA, real assets are locked in offline safes or legal documents, and the tokens on-chain are just "shadows." Shadows are disconnected from physical assets, and so-called stable returns become just air.

The project I looked at offered an annualized yield of directly 12%, far exceeding U.S. bonds. The white paper was full of grandiose claims, and the property deed scans looked very exquisite. But this is where the problem lies—images are the easiest to fake. When I went to verify the authenticity of these assets, numerous flaws emerged.

For RWA to truly develop healthily, the step of information verification is unavoidable. Blindly chasing high yields may ultimately result in losing even the principal.