Stablecoins Are Real World Assets

I want to talk about RWAs, but not in the way I usually do. Not the infrastructure, not the protocols, not the dashboards or the tickers. I want to talk about why stablecoins are already the most successful real world asset onchain, and why they expose just how outdated traditional banking has become. Because once you’ve experienced both systems side by side, it’s almost impossible to unsee the difference.

Most people don’t realise this, but stablecoins are RWAs. They are claims on real dollars, short-term treasuries, and regulated reserves. They are backed by offchain assets, managed by real companies, operating under real legal and compliance frameworks. There is nothing “imaginary” about them. The only meaningful difference is how they move.

Let me explain this through a few real examples from my own life.

A few weeks before Christmas, I tried to deposit a cheque. Nothing extreme. £750. The deposit was declined. Not because of fraud, not because the cheque was invalid, but because my bank has a maximum cheque deposit limit of £500. That’s it. A hard ceiling built into the system. No warning. No override. Just an arbitrary rule, enforced automatically, in 2026.

Another one. Try sending money through online banking. There’s always a daily cap. Send too frequently and you trigger reviews. Send too much and the transfer gets blocked entirely. Not because you’ve done anything wrong, but because the system assumes risk by default. You are allowed to move your money until you suddenly aren’t.

The one that really stuck with me happened last month. I sent £2,000 from my bank to a crypto exchange. Within minutes, my account was frozen. I was asked around twenty-five questions. Where did this money come from? Who are you investing with? What does the company do? What returns are you expecting? Why are you sending the money now? My funds were locked for two full days.

This isn’t an edge case. This is normal behaviour in modern banking. We’ve just been conditioned to accept it.

Now contrast that with stablecoins.

If I hold a stablecoin in my own wallet, I can move it at any time, in any amount, to anyone, without asking permission. Settlement is instant. Finality is real. There is no “pending”, no arbitrary pause, no freeze applied just in case. That doesn’t mean there is no compliance in the system. Issuers still operate within legal frameworks and regulatory obligations. But from the user’s point of view, the experience finally matches how money should feel in a digital world.

This is why stablecoins have quietly become one of the fastest growing real world assets on the planet.

If you look at platforms like rwa.xyz, you can see it clearly in the data. Tokenized treasuries, onchain money market funds, tokenized credit, tokenized commodities. Billions of dollars in real assets are already sitting onchain, growing week by week and month by month. Not because retail traders are gambling on them, but because institutions and allocators are slowly moving pieces of the financial system onto better rails.

What’s especially interesting is where the growth is concentrated. It’s in boring things. Short-term government debt. Cash-like instruments. Yield-bearing stable assets. Funds that look almost identical to traditional financial products.

And that’s the point. RWAs aren’t about replacing finance. They’re about making finance work the way people already expect it to work.

Most people think the banking system works fine because they’ve never experienced a real alternative. They’ve been taught that delays are normal. That limits exist for their own protection. That endless questions are just “part of the process”. But once you experience self-custodied money that settles instantly, the old system starts to feel less like protection and more like control.

Stablecoins don’t fix everything. RWAs don’t fix everything. But they show what becomes possible when money and assets are treated like digital objects instead of permission slips.

This is why education matters so much in this space. If more people actually understood how banking works, how settlement really works, and how money moves behind the scenes, they would be far less accepting of the status quo. They would start asking better questions. Why does a £750 cheque fail? Why can my money be frozen without explanation? Why does settlement take days when information moves instantly?

Once you start asking those questions, RWAs stop sounding niche and start sounding inevitable.

This isn’t about hating banks. They’re just old systems running on old processes. RWAs, and especially stablecoins, are what happens when those assumptions finally get challenged. Same assets. Same laws. Same risks. Just better rails underneath.

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