First, a brief summary of the “save traffic” version:

1. RWA is not just about adding more tradable assets—it’s about competing for the user’s asset access point.

2. Future competitive barriers will shift from “traffic + rebates” to “compliance + assets + ecosystem.”

3. The biggest risk for small and mid-sized platforms is not having no products, but lacking the capability to complete the financialization upgrade.

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At present, major platforms—besides cryptocurrencies—are all trying to introduce commodities. The U.S. and Hong Kong stock markets, and even Gate, have listed tokenized trading on the A-share market. In a bear market, incremental growth is drying up, and the hope to tap traditional asset access points to gain more traffic is becoming increasingly clear. However, compliance risks are also rising.

In a bear market phase, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to rely solely on growth from trading crypto assets, and top platforms are looking for a “second growth curve.” RWA (tokenization of real-world assets), tokenization of U.S. stocks/Hong Kong stocks/commodities—at its core, this is about competing for entry points in traditional finance.

But this path is not without risk. In the future, the biggest risk may not be technology, but regulation, asset structure, liquidity, and changes in the platform’s operating model.

In the past, the growth logic for CEXs was: new users → buy BTC/ETH → trade altcoins → leveraged derivatives → fee revenue. But now, BTC ETFs have diverted some institutional capital, altcoin cycles are getting shorter, user growth is slowing, and trading volumes in a bear market are falling—so exchanges need a new entry point. Binance / OKX / Bybit, etc. want to be not “crypto exchanges,” but “global digital asset financial entry points.” In the future, users may buy BTC, buy gold, buy U.S. stocks, buy Hong Kong stocks, buy indices, and participate in on-chain yields. But then regulators may view you as not merely running a crypto trading exchange, but operating a securities business.

So it’s possible that, in some countries, they may require takedowns, restrict user regions, impose fines, and require licenses.
There’s also another risk: do the assets truly “exist” or are they only a token that tracks Tesla’s price through a contract?

Many exchanges’ past advantages came from globalization, flexible regulation, and rapid innovation. But RWA naturally involves securities regulation, the banking system, and custody infrastructure. Many smaller platforms will lose the ability to build these capabilities.

If you take the compliance-first route, growth is slower but regulatory barriers are high. If you take the rapid-innovation route, speed is fast, but regulatory friction increases.

The current RWA experiments are to capture the entry point. Ultimately, once regulation becomes clear, the true winners may not be traditional CEXs, but rather an “on-chain version of an all-in-one financial platform.” Similar to: Robinhood + Binance + BlackRock.

Whether you can “quickly seize the entry point and achieve licensing compliance” may gradually become the key to surviving.