Recently, this trend has become increasingly apparent: RWA, especially stocks on the chain. More and more Web3 projects are starting to move traditional stocks onto the chain, allowing you to trade Tesla, Apple, and Nvidia 24 hours a day.

Some people say this is the end of the traditional financial order, a prelude to 'global asset liberation.'

But honestly, I don't think this is an innovation. It feels more like a primal reaction of capital, a self-consistent choice made by an industry trying to survive in a globally imbalanced structure.

The popularity of on-chain stocks reveals not the future direction, but a reality: Web3 can no longer find 'priceable' native assets, and traditional finance cannot find new capital containers; thus, both are grafting each other's 'bubble surplus' together.

To understand why 'on-chain stocks' have become popular, we need to look at its background: we are in an era where asset pricing mechanisms are gradually failing.

Core inflation in the U.S. remains high, interest rates continue to stay elevated, and 'long-term capital' is becoming conservative;

The activity in China's asset market is declining, A-shares are sluggish, the real estate deleveraging continues, and although M2 is accelerating, money has not effectively converted into credit expansion;

Europe's economy is weak, and Japan's asset market has strengthened, raising concerns about structural bubbles, while global risk aversion is rising;

In the crypto market, native assets are continuously collapsing between bulls and bears, BTC and ETH are being 'institutionalized,' lacking new narratives, new consensus, and new wealth leverage.

The 'asset genealogy' of the entire capital market is experiencing fractures: asset types that can tell stories and be monetized are rapidly disappearing.

Thus, capital begins to seek 'secondary narrative space.'

On-chain stocks are financial 're-narration' containers born out of this background.

Essentially, it transforms assets that have already been priced in the real world into a mirror product that can be re-traded and re-timed.

In other words, it does not create new value but rather repackages existing value.

Why can Web3 take this baton? Because it also lacks consensus, lacks assets, and lacks increment.

After experiencing the bull and bear market of 2021-2022, the crypto industry has gradually entered a state of 'structural overcapacity':

Project narratives are similar;

Applications lack user retention capabilities;

Native assets are difficult to reactivate faith.

This generation of Web3 entrepreneurs is facing seasoned investors who have seen through incentive mechanisms, inflation models, and Ponzi structures.

You cannot create assets through incentives; you can only rely on 'familiarity' to provoke trading behavior. You cannot create consensus; you can only bring in assets from the old world that already have pricing and volatility, disrupt their trading rhythm, and apply them to new DeFi templates on the chain.

This is not a revolution; it is grafting. But grafting is also the most rational choice for realists.

Many of us mistakenly think that 'on-chain stocks' are a reform of the traditional stock system; in fact, it does not change the essence of stocks but changes 'who controls the trading clock.'

Traditional financial markets have clear trading times, settlement rules, and clearing cycles; these are the anchors of the system. But therefore, it also limits the 'granularity' of liquidity.

What the on-chain version does is very simple:

Convert stock assets into tokens that can be traded at any time;

Use contract automatic clearing logic to replace clearing institutions;

Fragment traditional assets and introduce mechanisms such as liquidity mining, oracle, and leverage positions;

Most importantly, transfer the transaction fees and clock power that originally belonged to exchanges, brokers, and custodians to on-chain protocols and token holders.

This is the biggest change in on-chain stocks: it's not 'who owns the stock,' but 'who can share the profit slices from this trading time.'

Ownership becomes less important; controlling the trading scenario and mastering the liquidity profit within the time window is key.

Trading rights, rather than ownership, are the core of this financial structural reconstruction.

Many people are worried about regulatory issues, thinking that 'trading Apple on-chain' will attract the SEC and securities regulatory commissions. But I believe that these are not the most concerning issues.

The real problem is whether these project parties have properly established legal protections, clearing mechanisms, and credit guarantees behind the technology that wraps trust.

If not, then this is essentially a game of decoupling reality, virtualizing liquidity, and distributing the illusion of trading rights.

To some extent, it replicates the 'magical contract logic' of derivatives such as CDS and MBS before the financial crisis: constantly wrapping old assets, continuously slicing and re-trading, and amplifying volatility, but the assets themselves do not grow.

This is the cycle of bubbles.

The essence of 'on-chain stocks' is not the future, but a financial refugee camp in the context of capital structure collapse.

Traditional finance can no longer create high-growth assets; it can only find 'volatility substitutes'; Web3 cannot create native asset consensus anymore; it can only seek 'familiarity anchoring';

Thus, both shake hands in the gap of 'tokenization,' forming this seemingly innovative but actually compromised financial puzzle.

This is not the endpoint of Web3, nor its utopia. But it is the intermediate zone it must traverse, the gray area before all civilization transformations.

Do not become obsessed with this system, but do not underestimate it either.

It is a symptom of the failure of the contemporary capital system, the real business direction of on-chain finance, and also a link we must transcend.

We cannot just stay at the level of 'can it be traded'; we should further consider: what exactly are we pricing in this market?

Is it assets, or is it the volatility itself?

And if it is just the latter, then the future of Web3 lies even further ahead.