How long will RWA’s spring last?

Author: Ye Kaiwen

RWA’s spring has come in the spring of 2025, and it will probably run into summer in a few weeks. Looking back at the time when RWA was preached in 2023/2024, it was often criticized because of 2.5 and the institutional market. However, the wind has changed recently, and KOLs with thick eyebrows and big eyes and various associations and alliances have begun to gather in RWA like mushrooms after rain. This enthusiastic atmosphere will soon be summer.

Spring actually comes very quickly, while summer is unpredictable with thunderstorms. Currently, there are many people who are enthusiastic about RWA, but there are many people who are just looking for fame and learning from the tyrants. They ask questions here and there to put together a plan and collect some money for the entire project, but they have no patience and energy to study and practice RWA properly.

Latest News on New Energy RWA

On March 18, the National Development and Reform Commission, the National Energy Administration, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and other five departments jointly issued the "Opinions on Promoting the High-Quality Development of the Renewable Energy Green Electricity Certificate Market" (hereinafter referred to as the "Opinions"), which for the first time clearly put forward the mandatory consumption of green electricity for some industries.

(V) Clarify the mandatory consumption requirements of green certificates. Steadily promote the mandatory consumption of green certificates in accordance with the law, gradually increase the proportion of green electricity consumption and use green certificates for accounting. Accelerate the increase in the proportion of green electricity consumption by enterprises and data centers in industries such as steel, nonferrous metals, building materials, petrochemicals, and chemicals, as well as other key energy-consuming units and industries. In principle, by 2030, it should not be lower than the national average level of the total renewable energy power consumption responsibility weight; the proportion of green electricity consumption in newly built data centers at national hub nodes will be further increased on the basis of 80%. In areas with conditions, a number of green electricity factories and green electricity parks with a high proportion of green electricity consumption will be built in a classified and graded manner, and they will be encouraged to achieve 100% green electricity consumption. Incorporate green electricity consumption information into the environmental, social and corporate governance (ESG) reporting system of listed companies.

Among them, green computing and green electricity computing power are directly connected, and data centers are not less than 80% green electricity, which happens to be the viewpoint of the upper and lower articles of last year's green electricity computing power: green electricity computing power assets have now become a policy. In addition to the direct connection of green electricity computing power, there are also green certificate trading markets, green electricity computing power consumption, etc., and the content of the article is being implemented step by step except for the overseas part. Therefore, the core of RWA is not to find a customer to issue a bond, but to be able to go deep into the industry, transaction structure and future trends, so that it is possible to design a truly effective RWA project framework.

At the same time, the third case of Hong Kong's new energy RWA came out. Ant Digital's RWA was launched one after another. Although it was still a new energy theme this time, it was no longer the main body of the listed company, and the assets were two-wheeled electric vehicle battery swap cabinets (last year, several two-wheeled electric vehicle battery swap cabinet companies and charging pile companies came to us to discuss RWA issuance, but the asset scale and credit status did not meet the requirements and gave up); and the financing amount was getting smaller and smaller, only tens of millions of Hong Kong dollars; what is more conscious is that the introduction of a tree graph public chain and an ecological enterprise suddenly became confusing.

RWA is not just about issuing a bond and putting it there, just like some companies originally planned to roll out tens of billions of assets, but without the secondary market and liquidity, they could only be stranded. RWA assets must have liquidity, and they must still be designed from the perspective of a project, combined with the industrial ecology and industrial chain value space, and consider the linkage between the primary, secondary and even tertiary markets.

RWACan it be issued?

From the second half of last year to the beginning of this spring, more and more companies and people have asked if they can issue RWA? Most of them were discouraged by me. It is not that listed companies do not have asset scale and capital scale, and it is not recommended to consider issuing Hong Kong RWA. Of course, it is not ruled out that some high-quality small and medium-sized enterprise projects or assets can issue offshore RWA. However, we do not want to just collect money to do projects. Instead, we hope to have a group of comrades who are truly concerned and willing to go deep. It is better to teach people how to fish than to give them fish. We can conduct in-depth training and guidance to promote the reasonable and orderly development of the RWA market together, rather than let some pyramid schemes and investors who are hot to do whatever they want to confuse the market.

Some of the early project teams were very attentive. For example, they would print out all my RWA articles in the past two years and circulate them within the team. All the different angles of RWA are covered in those more than 20 articles with more than 100,000 words, but most people don't have the patience to read the articles, and are used to asking some very basic and novice questions. Even worse, some impetuous people come up and add WeChat, ask brothers and brothers, and then see how our RWA solution is? Then I look at it, the content is my articles from one or two years ago, or the frameworks I talked about in the tour seminar last year, some of which were put into the solution without any changes. What can I say, it can't be said that great minds think alike, we have been thinking alike for more than a year in advance.

We toured the seminar last year, from Shanghai to Suzhou, then Hangzhou and Shenzhen, and then Singapore. Then this year, it was very lively outside, and heroes from all walks of life started various RWAs, and we started to work hard. Last year's seminar released our 6 RWA frameworks: products, ecology, tracks, industries, global cross-domain, and future new finance. Among them, there are multiple frameworks that have appeared in the solutions of different RWA service agencies many times. Regardless of whether they can explain it clearly or not, at least they have promoted the RWA market, just like my book "Token Economic Design Patterns" in 2018, which was used by many ICO projects as a guidebook for the coin issuance economic model. This is also a merit in promoting the market.

Serious nonsense

With the tradition of RWA, various information asymmetry situations have emerged. The most important thing is that more and more KOLs and Internet celebrities in different tracks have also entered the RWA field. This thing is in the early stage anyway, no matter what you say, so you can see a lot of serious nonsense. Of course, there are also some who understand half of it and say half-truths, which seem to be very professional, but a small half of the most critical practices are wrong, which is the most harmful.

In our previous articles on liquidity and industrial RWA upgrades, we mentioned Hong Kong primary, overseas secondary, on-chain liquidity, bond issuance, pledge, and the four-layer stage of industrial RWA. Recently, many KOLs and plans have also started various contents, but it is more feasible that everyone has a narrow understanding of the secondary market, and they talk about it differently. Some understand it as a trading platform, and some even use the previous NFT digital treasure e-commerce platform to transform it and call it the secondary market.

Speaking of which, there are quite a few NFT/digital treasures that have been revived recently under the concept of RWA. Using NFT to tokenize RWA assets is actually a good thing. Even in the RWA project, it can also be combined with physical asset positions or minting NFTs when redeeming to pay and write off, etc. It is a good scenario, but using the previous NFT digital treasure e-commerce model to do RWA, under the euphemism of secondary market and hype, is also drunk.

Finally, let's talk about Hainan and Shanghai. Especially Hainan. Recently, many people have been advocating Hainan, saying that after the seclusion, an RWA exchange will be opened, virtual asset transactions will be allowed, or something like that. In the past few years, when we were communicating with the Hainan Provincial Government to set up a REITs trading sector and participated in the financing of Hainan Life Insurance, Hainan Commercial Aerospace, etc., we worked closely with the provincial government and the Provincial Financial Bureau, and were familiar with Hainan's legislation, regulatory compliance, and offshore finance. In terms of exchange compliance, Hainan cannot break through the three red lines, and the core of Hainan's offshore finance lies in "Hainan + Hong Kong/Macao + Overseas". As a supporting facility for Hong Kong and Macao, it is impossible to break through directly in Hainan. Hainan's advantages mainly lie in the outgoing VIE structure and the returning QFLP channel, as well as the overseas information access without VPN. These are the core advantages of establishing an RWA issuance and operation base in Hainan. The same is true for the Shanghai Free Trade Zone, which is the only international financial center in the mainland.