Protofire | Onchain Engineering

Tokenized RWAs just crossed $30B. That measures how much value has been put on-chain. It says nothing about how much of it anyone can actually trade. TVL and liquidity get read as the same signal. They aren't. One says an asset has been represented as a token. The other says there's a buyer, a price, and a way out when you want it. Much of today's tokenized value scores high on the first and near zero on the second. Most tokenized treasuries mint through the issuer and redeem through the issuer, with little trading in between. If the only buyer is the issuer at redemption, that's not a secondary market. It's a redemption line. And it won't be uniform across asset classes. Treasuries, equities, commodities and FX already have deep off-chain markets, so they arrive on-chain with a price and people who know how to make one. Private credit, real estate and one-offs don't. Tokenizing them doesn't create demand that never existed. @dillonhanson12 from @DIAdata_org makes this point during the Protocol Roundtable: expecting every tokenized asset to reach deep on-chain liquidity is a real bottleneck. Issuance has matured much faster than the market structure that makes an asset tradable. A tokenized asset with no compliant venue to trade still has value. But it's a redemption mechanism, not a market. What do you see as the biggest obstacle to building real secondary markets for RWAs?