Sébastien Derivaux
Sébastien Derivaux|Sep 12, 2025 10:33
Are public permissionless blockchain ready for RWA? Interesting debate on @BanklessHQ between @malekanoms and @CampbellJAustin . My thoughts below. First, @CampbellJAustin point is correct only to the extend of someone hacking an asset issuer security. All other examples are wrong. If North Korea steal your USDC, @circle can revert the transaction. Your grandma property will not go to NK because it will work only with KYCed people and a notary validating the transfer (and able to revert it anytime). Same for JPM tokenized deposits. But yes, if NK get admin rights on USDC, then anything integrating USDC is dead. Circle might issue a new USDC with the last "legit" snapshot, but any immutable DeFi or transaction after the hacks are dead. Second, the speed of crypto is underestimated. No validator can save the day. Money will be mixed with everyone in DeFi in less than a few blocks. And then, what can a validator, or anyone, do? When NK stole one billion from the central bank of Bangladesh (using SWIFT, not a blockchain) the only thing that saved most of it was paperwork (a.k.a transactions that require humans, not blockchain compliant). It took days to move money between banks and clean them through casinos and other means. So if you can't fix it in slow motion, no way to fix it at light speed. The "a third party we trust will put a signal on-chain so we can freeze DeFi" doesn't work, it will be too late. So what do we do? I'm firmly in the camp of you can build centralized systems on top of decentralized ones, but not the reverse. We will have walled gardens built on top of the chaos of Ethereum and that is fine. We should have more resilient smart contracts. If a RWA is in a smart contract, maybe this contract should give the RWA issuer the right to move positions. So he doesn't have to destroy everything by freezing the smart contract when a court force him to do so. But we also need to have the risk management practices to assume that the USDC receipt token might be reissued to a new address and assume the consequences. It is way too early for anyone to have a serious opinion or even comprehend the problem. What I know is that liquidity trumps everything, so the winner will be the one who scale. I also believe the future will be hybrid and what matters is to enable composability (or having bridges between those worlds).(Sébastien Derivaux)
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