Real World Assets (RWA) are on-chain assets that represents an asset off-chain such as real-estate, insurance, fiat, precious metals & other commodities (R2).
The first RWAs were stablecoins. RWAs are a way for on-chain projects to participate in off-chain economic activity via the use of dApps, oracle data feeds, smart contracts, & usually some physical custody of an item such as mortgages, invoices, notes, gold, fiat or bonds in lieu of cash.
RWA projects make lending & borrowing of these assets in Defi possible & opens the door to tokenized securities offerings in the future. Stablecoins with these asset custody properties are the first on-chain RWA use case, because they custody off-chain fiat for on-chain non-volatile fiat value.
RWA
References:
R1 https://brickken.com/fr/whitepaper/
R2 https://medium.com/coinmonks/defi-2-0-real-world-assets-b451b30ab675
R3 https://thedefiant.io/makerdao-will-soon-hold-real-world-assets-as-collateral
R4 https://mirror.xyz/cryptokailash.eth/4mi-lD4obouvaI4GrkxmRP13Mj1vb8S8im-8yVL0R_w
R5 https://tokeny.com/tokenization-is-the-first-step-for-real-world-assets-in-defi/
R6 https://www.gemini.com/cryptopedia/centrifuge-crypto-tinlake-tokenization-real-world-assets
