In a move that has rippled through the RWA ecosystem, Yuanjie Zhang, one of the founders of Conflux, who goes by Forgivenever in X and is a key ecosystem promoter (think Mert Mumtaz outside of Conflux and RWA), has publicly criticized the RWA analytics platform RWA.xyz.
His statement comes at a sensitive time for the RWA sector, which has seen an explosion of institutional investor interest in 2024 and 2025.
in long x post Writing in Zhang’s native Chinese, the co-founder accused RWA.xyz of sharing biased data and selectively reporting blockchain networks.
What does the co-founder of Conflux say about RWA.xyz?
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His claims suggest that the platform is no longer fair, influencing which projects and networks gain visibility as more institutional investors become involved.
Zhang claims that RWA.xyz distorts and erodes the global RWA market by ignoring or underreporting actual RWA trading volumes on fringe, less popular, or non-Western platforms like Conflux.
He said the platform’s new methodology, which it switched to a month ago following a revamp, prioritizes narrative over unfiltered on-chain facts. He suggested that new approaches to data curation do not take into account important liquidity pools in the growing Asian market.
Before the revamp, RWA.xyz claimed the industry’s total RWA size was around $300 billion. However, after the redesign, that number increased to $410 billion and two new metrics were introduced.
The first metric is the reported asset value, which is $410 billion and covers assets tokenized as digital certificates on private or permissioned chains, without any true on-chain transfer or genuine public distribution.
The second metric introduced is Decentralized Asset Value, which is valued at $18 billion and targets assets that are distributed via blockchains and exchanges’ on-chain protocols and accessible to crypto investors who can hold them via wallets or custodians.
As far as Zhang is concerned, the second metric represents the true magnitude of the crypto connection.
Another metric, the touted value of $410 billion, he said, is 91% controlled by Canton’s private chain, which he claims is the new “sugar daddy.” He hinted that it would replace Figure’s Provenance chain. The chain claims it was the first organization to bribe the RWA.xyz platform and that it has been relegated to second place behind Canton for not going public and “renewing subscriptions.”
Zhang alleged that Figure bribed platforms to forcefully stuff home equity loan company data into industry statistical tables, inflating the actual $18 billion in RWA assets that were actually sold to investors to more than $300 billion.
Currently, it is the cantons that do the bribery, so the figures account for only 3% of the reported asset value, while the cantons account for 91%.
Citing Mr. Figure’s loan, he argued that this was not the first time RWA.xyz had dabbled in data manipulation, which played a role in boosting the numbers before the reclassification. Mr Chan hinted that commercial incentives drive inclusion.
According to him, after excluding the inflated figure anomaly from the diversified asset value, a certain level of fair baseline was restored.
In his post, Zhang claims that RWA.xyz is defrauding US investors in the crypto and equity sectors. He claims that the platform has set its sights on the Hong Kong market, seeing as Asia’s RWA sector is booming.
How true are the suspicions?
The claims in Zhang’s post were corroborated by his supporters, who also claimed there were contradictions. When one user asked which data aggregation platform provides accurate data, another user claimed that most other platforms are better than RWA.xyz because they do not contain such exaggerations.
Indeed, data from other major aggregators like DefiLlama shows a notable gap compared to RWA.xyz, which reports a TVL of over $21 billion in tokenized government debt and private credit.
DefiLlama uses a permissionless, bottom-up indexing method that typically shows higher numbers for certain protocols and also includes data from chains that RWA.xyz has not yet fully recognized or integrated with. This is especially true for the private credit sector. DefiLlama lists emerging protocols on L1 networks that are not present in the RWA.xyz leaderboard.
Mike Cagney, co-founder of When Figure called DefiLlama sued DefiLlama in September for excluding Figure’s data from its platform, but the aggregator defended the lawsuit by stating that Figure’s data was not verifiable and lacked a true on-chain footprint.
Meanwhile, RWA.xyz defends its methodology, claiming that it “standardizes and validates first-party data” to ensure institutional-grade accuracy. Still, some critics, like Zhang, believe that the so-called verification process is essentially a whitelist.
The contradiction Chan describes is most apparent when considering the Asian RWA market. We found that RWA.xyz is heavily dominated by US-based entities like Ondo and BUIDL, while tokenized commercial paper and green bonds originating from eastern infrastructure like Conflux and various Hong Kong-based pilots are undervalued.
In response to the allegations, the co-founder and CEO of RWA.xyz said: blog He talked about the new framework and indicated that he was ready to collaborate as soon as he got “feedback” from Conflux.
