Not All Rwa Growth Is Real, And The Industry Knows It
Inflated dashboards don’t build institutional trust. Only verifiable assets, regulatory clarity and real usage can power the RWA revolution.
Opinion by: Aishwary Gupta, global head of payments and RWAs at Polygon Labs
Most of the eye-popping RWA numbers making headlines are smoke and mirrors. Unless the industry course-corrects, it risks eroding the institutional trust it has spent years trying to build. Every week brings another announcement claiming billions in tokenized assets. When institutional investors request basic details, however, the answers become mysteriously vague.
OpenAI was forced to distance itself from Robinhood’s claim that it was offering access to tokenized stock, clarifying that this did not represent real equity in the company. In May 2025, the SEC charged Unicoin for misleading investors by overstating the value of tokenized real estate deals.
From the continued double-counting problem to the opaque legal status of many tokens, it’s clear that the RWA revolution still faces major roadblocks to achieving credibility.
This is actively harmful to the institutional adoption everyone claims to want. The industry’s obsession with vanity metrics undermines the very credibility that RWAs need, so the ecosystem can unlock the trillions of institutional capital waiting on the sidelines.
“The biggest risk today is assuming that a legal wrapper and a blockchain alone create value,” Forbes cited Ian Balina, CEO of Token Metrics, as saying. “Without real composability, reliable secondary markets, and trusted custody, tokenized assets remain stuck in marketing decks rather than investment portfolios.”
Related: RWA platform enters new phase, expanding compliant access to onchain assetsHe’s right. Treating numbers on dashboards as if they’re all that matter is actively harmful. Every inflated claim makes it harder for legitimate projects to be taken seriously. When a pension fund’s due diligence team can’t distinguish between real deployments and phantom TVL, they aren’t interested in picking the real one. They’d rather walk away entirely.
Blockchain’s entire value proposition is transparency and verifiability. Yet here we are, asking institutions to trust numbers we can’t (or won’t) prove.
Chains that can’t demonstrate verifiable activity or regulatory alignment aren’t only putting their own users at risk, but also undermining the integrity of the entire blockchain ecosystem. They are inflating expectations and undermining trust in the who
Source: CoinTelegraph
