By now, it is fairly obvious to anyone that bringing Real World Assets (RWAs) onchain is the next move for taking onchain finance mainstream. RWA markets allow participants to price, trade, lend, and collateralize real-world assets–stocks, commodities, currencies, credit instruments–directly on blockchain rails. These markets bridge the liquidity and composability of DeFi with the scale and stability of traditional finance. 

Prediction markets are where information becomes money. They allow people to trade on the likelihood of future events–anything from election outcomes and sports results to geopolitical milestones and technological breakthroughs. Since accurate predictions earn rewards, participants are incentivized to act on what they know. Someone with private knowledge (e.g., an insider at a tech company or a geopolitical expert) has a good reason to express that knowledge by taking a market position.

When developers complain that crypto applications are expensive to build and hard to run profitably, they often blame gas fees, scaling limits, or user friction. But there’s another, deeper issue at play: the compounding cost of middleware.

The limitations your team and developers across the industry are facing are not a sign that programmable money is a failed promise. They are a sign that we have been trying to build the future of finance on infrastructure that was never designed for the job.

At Subzero Labs, we believe that the AI systems that will have the greatest impact on humanity will be decentralized.

Real-world assets (RWAs) are one of blockchain’s biggest promises and biggest letdowns. Billions in tokenized treasuries, real estate, and credit already exist, yet they still behave like slow, clunky replicas of their off-chain counterparts.

Bitcoin created digital scarcity. Ethereum introduced programmable trust. Fast chains followed, all racing to be faster on paper. And yet, most new users still quit near the starting line. Why?