Liquidity Fragmentation and Chain Abstraction: The Culprits Restricting the Development of RWA

Blockchain technology is reshaping the global financial system, and Reliable Authentication (RWA) has become a bridge between traditional finance and DeFi. Once traditional assets such as real estate, art, bonds, and gold are converted into on-chain tokens, they enable global asset mobility and ownership fragmentation. This is an undeniable revolution in financial technology. According to current market data, the market capitalization of non-stablecoin RWAs has reached US$33.7 billion and is expected to exceed one trillion yuan by 2030. This success is due to the trustlessness and transparency of blockchain in asset custody and circulation. However, it is clear that RWAs also face challenges in liquidity fragmentation and security. The concept of RWA originates from the digital transformation of traditional assets by blockchain, mapping physical assets into programmable tokens, thereby absorbing global liquidity. According to the latest report, the RWA tokenization market is expanding at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of over 50%, driven mainly by the maturity of DeFi, the improvement of the regulatory environment, and the influx of institutional investors. For companies in traditional industries, issuing RWAs has multiple positive implications. First, it broadens financing channels. Traditional financing often relies on bank loans or stock issuance, but these methods have high barriers to entry and long cycles. Through RWAs, companies can tokenize assets such as real estate or intellectual property, directly attracting global investors and achieving low-cost financing. For example, a real estate company could split a property into thousands of tokens, each costing only a few hundred dollars. This low-barrier approach significantly reduces financing costs. Secondly, RWA improves asset liquidity. For example, art and private equity often have extremely low liquidity, with transactions often taking months from proposal to completion. However, through on-chain RWA tokens, these assets can be traded instantly in the secondary market. Furthermore, RWA promotes financial innovation and effective risk diversification. Traditional investment institutions can create new financial products through tokenization, such as yield-bearing tokens, allowing token investors to receive dividends from asset returns. Furthermore, RWAs for heavy assets like real estate can fragment ownership, attracting a diverse range of investors and effectively diversifying risk. Furthermore, RWAs enhance the competitiveness of certain companies. Amidst the wave of digital transformation, companies adopting blockchain technology are more likely to attract resources within the Web3 ecosystem and attract investment and financing institutions. For example, last August, Longxin Group partnered with Ant Digital Technology to complete China's first RWA financing transaction based on new energy assets, using some of Longxin's charging stations as RWA anchor assets, raising 100 million RMB. Overall, RWA can revitalize traditional companies, helping them transition from closed local markets to open, global systems. However, despite its significant significance and rapid development, RWA is hampered by a core pain point: the sheer number of public chains in the Web3 world means liquidity is fragmented across hundreds of them, leading to significant fragmentation. Similar phenomena are common in the traditional internet sector. Before the World Wide Web (WWW) became the dominant text data transmission protocol, there were numerous competitors, such as Gopher, Archie, WAIS, Usenet, and BBS. These systems or protocols all provided file retrieval, forum communication, or file transfer capabilities. However, due to various limitations, they ultimately operated independently, without establishing a unified and efficient consensus. After Tim Berners-Lee proposed the concept of the World Wide Web in 1989, it quickly gained popularity thanks to its hypertext links, multimedia support, and user-friendliness. By 1995, the World Wide Web had essentially established its dominant position, ending the chaotic and incompatible state of Internet text transfer protocols and establishing a unified, open, and inclusive network system on a global scale. Compared to the traditional internet, blockchain, deeply tied to financial capital, geopolitics, and other factors, has long lacked a unified set of standards. Furthermore, with everyone wanting to build a public chain, even after more than a decade of development, the industry remains far from achieving the same unified technical standards as the traditional internet, remaining multipolar. Many public chains have their own sets of technical standards and independent ecosystems, leading to a serious problem: liquidity fragmentation. Public chains like Ethereum, Solana, and Sui each have their own advantages, but assets cannot flow seamlessly across chains, forcing traders to be limited to the liquidity pools of specific chains. For example, an RWA token issued on Ethereum may not be easily transferable to Solana. This pain point can be amplified into a systemic problem. First, insufficient liquidity leads to large price fluctuations. The trading volume of single-chain RWAs is often limited, making them susceptible to manipulation by large investors and exposing investors to high slippage risk. Second, the opportunity cost is high. Users need to switch wallets and assets between multiple chains, increasing operational complexity and security risks.

Third, from an ecological perspective, single-chain issuance hinders the deep integration of RWA and DeFi, and cannot fully utilize cross-chain DeFi income or lending opportunities.

This is the "island effect" of the blockchain. The consensus mechanisms and token standards (such as ERC-20 and SPL) of different chains are incompatible, and asset transfers require cross-chain bridges, which are often the weakest link in the system. Cross-chain bridges not only affect the development of RWA, but also restrict the development of the entire blockchain industry. To address the problem of blockchain silos, various cross-chain technologies have emerged. However, most solutions cannot perfectly achieve multi-chain liquidity transfer, not to mention that many cross-chain bridges do not support RWA assets. To this day, the simplest and crudest multi-signature cross-chain bridges remain the mainstream, but these solutions have already experienced numerous failures. As of June 2025, cross-chain bridge hacks have caused losses exceeding $2.8 billion, the vast majority of which involved multi-signature cross-chain bridges. For RWA, since it involves high-value physical assets, any security vulnerability could result in huge losses. This is far more complex and difficult to resolve than simple Web3 issues. Therefore, cross-chain transactions have become a bottleneck in the development of RWAs. Efficiently mobilizing liquidity within a multi-chain ecosystem is a serious issue. Another significant pain point of traditional cross-chain bridges is excessive latency. Verification of multi-signature bridges requires consensus among multiple nodes, and asset transfers from Ethereum to Solana can take minutes to half an hour, a fact unacceptable to those accustomed to instant payments in the traditional financial system. In high-frequency trading scenarios, high latency can severely restrict the efficiency of RWA circulation. Especially during market fluctuations, delays of seconds can lead to significant losses. The operational experience of cross-chain bridges is another major bottleneck. Take a simple example: if an ordinary user wants to use coin B on chain A to purchase coin D on chain C, or the so-called "ABCD transaction", they need to go through tedious steps: first, exchange it for assets shared by both chains on the A-chain DEX, then transfer it to the C-chain through a cross-chain bridge, and finally complete the transaction on the C-chain DEX.

The entire process requires users to complete it manually in at least three dApps. This not only involves multi-chain wallet switching and gas fee payments, but also requires understanding the operating logic of the bridge protocol. Non-experienced Web3 users find it difficult to master it. Potential Web3 users give up participating in on-chain interactions due to the complexity of cross-chain operations, accounting for almost 95%. This greatly limits the popularity of RWA and the expansion of the Web3 ecosystem. The Rise of Chain Abstraction and Case Studies Based on the above analysis, the limitations of traditional cross-chain bridges in security, speed, and user experience have made it difficult to meet the needs of the rapid growth of RWA and the expansion of the Web3 ecosystem. Centralization risks, transaction delays, and cumbersome operational processes not only hinder the full-chain liquidity of RWA assets, but also limit the participation of non-experienced users, hindering the popularization of Web3.

Against this backdrop, chain abstraction, as an emerging concept, has gradually gained attention, providing a new perspective for solving cross-chain interoperability.

Chain abstraction is a grand vision of Web3. It refers to shielding various complex operational details and cumbersome components through a single user interface,

allowing users to automatically access liquidity within different public chain ecosystems through a one-click transaction on a single platform, providing the best trading experience through the method of "analyzing user intent → splitting orders → routing → execution."

For example, within the UniversalX platform, we can see the liquidity distribution of CRV tokens on four public chains. The platform can automatically split users' large purchase orders into multiple small purchase orders, which interact in different pools to minimize slippage. To achieve this effect, there must be a mature full-chain interaction system behind it.

In addition to UniversalX, other cutting-edge projects have begun to fully explore the potential of chain abstraction and intent platforms, attempting to reshape the issuance and circulation model of RWA through bridgeless interoperability and a unified settlement mechanism. Taking PicWe as an example, this solution aggregates full-chain liquidity through omni-chain infrastructure and issues RWAs with one click, raising $1 million through RWAs for the Isfayram Phase I small hydropower station of AK BUURA Energy Group. By focusing on PicWe's full-chain RWA solution, we can gain a deeper understanding of the impact of chain abstraction on RWAs. PicWe has built a user-intentioned, full-chain swap system for IRO (Initial RWA Offering) RWA assets, using the stablecoin WEUSD as the medium of exchange. This system eliminates the need for traditional bridges. This design shields the complexity of inter-chain operations and optimizes liquidity and security. PicWe's chain abstraction implementation is based on the Chain Abstract Transaction Model (CATM). This model is essentially a distributed transaction coordination framework that deploys standardized contracts on each chain connected to PicWe, which serve as state synchronization and execution nodes. Unlike traditional cross-chain solutions that rely on a "lock-and-mint" process involving an intermediary bridge, CATM employs an intent-driven execution logic: users submit transaction intentions on the source chain, and the system automatically matches and settles transactions through a network of contracts, eliminating the need for manual user intervention in inter-chain transfers. This abstraction layer treats multiple chains as a logical entity, presenting users with a single transaction entry point. Under the hood, contracts handle verification, routing, and release, ensuring atomic execution across multiple chains. The key technology supporting CATM is the Omni-Chain Permissionless Bidding Orchestration Protocol (OPBOP), an open bidding coordination protocol that allows any liquidity provider (LP) to participate in cross-chain order matching without permission. OPBOP works similarly to a decentralized auction market: When a user initiates a cross-chain purchase, the protocol broadcasts the order details to the contract pool of the target chain, where limited partners (LPs) bid to provide the desired assets based on real-time quotes. The bidding process incorporates a time-decay mechanism—the initial bid is high, and as more LPs respond, the price gradually decreases until the optimal match is reached. This not only enables low-threshold liquidity injection but also encourages LPs to proactively bridge supply gaps through economic incentives, avoiding the static lock-up of traditional bridges. If OPBOP is the technical foundation for PicWe's chain-abstract swaps, the stablecoin WEUSD is a crucial medium in this process. WEUSD is minted 1:1 with user-collateralized USDC and can be redeemed at any time. In the "ABCD transaction" process mentioned earlier, Coin B on Chain A is first swapped for WEUSD on Chain A, then automatically converted to WEUSD on Chain C by PicWe's smart contract, and finally swapped back to Coin D. This entire process is completed with a single click on the PicWe exchange. Users are completely unaware of the cross-chain bridge and the existence of WEUSD; it's as if their Coin B was directly exchanged for Coin D. In DeFi, WEUSD will serve as collateral for lending, enabling multi-chain yield farming. On the RWA platform, it bridges TradFi assets such as bonds or real estate tokens, ensuring compliant circulation and handling the settlement of RWA asset returns. For cross-chain payments, WEUSD serves as a medium of exchange across all chains. As PicWe integrates with more and more chains, even all public chains, WEUSD will become the settlement layer for the entire blockchain ecosystem, supporting DeFi, RWA platforms, and cross-chain payments. If this process can be effectively advanced, we may see the emergence of a standardized RWA full-chain liquidity protocol. Conclusion The rise of RWA opens up broad prospects for Web3, connecting traditional finance with the decentralized ecosystem. However, the fragmentation of cross-chain liquidity, security risks, and complex user experience remain core pain points that constrain its potential. The silo effect caused by single-chain issuance, the high cost and latency of traditional cross-chain bridges, and the entry barriers for non-experienced users have collectively inhibited the global circulation of RWA and the innovative vitality of Web3. Chain abstraction, as an emerging paradigm, shields the complexity of multi-chain operations and enables seamless asset flows. Chain abstraction not only promises to resolve the dilemma of cross-chain interoperability but also enhances RWA's capital efficiency and security. Perhaps in the future, as chain abstraction technology matures and cross-chain issues are truly resolved, RWA will be able to move from a tens of billions to a trillion-dollar market, truly achieving the deep integration of traditional and digital finance.