Recent news has once again brought to mind an old topic—the Oil Coin.

Interestingly, someone commented: "Someone who issued a Memecoin was arrested while someone who issued an RWA Token was not." This statement somewhat reveals the ironic contrast between two different paths in the history of cryptocurrency.

The story's background is Venezuela's tumultuous inflation journey. Around 2016, the local inflation rate soared to 2600%, and the traditional fiat system was on the brink of collapse. Amid this economic hardship, the Oil Coin was born—as a national-level blockchain experiment, it attempted to save the economy by tokenizing the country's oil reserves.

From a technological innovation perspective, the Oil Coin represents an early exploration of the RWA (Real-World Asset Tokenization) concept. At that time, blockchain had not yet broken into the finance sector from the tech world, nor had ecosystems like DeFi and NFTs fully formed. The emergence of the Oil Coin essentially posed a profound question: Can blockchain redefine the logic of currency issuance and asset anchoring?

Of course, the experiment's final outcome was not ideal. But regardless of success or failure, the Oil Coin left a certain historical mark: it signaled that a sovereign nation seriously attempted to reform its monetary system using blockchain for the first time, and it marked the first step of RWA from theory to practice.

Looking back now, from the Oil Coin to today's various RWA projects in different ecosystems, and to the explosion of Memecoins, the development path of the crypto world is clearer than anyone's: innovation is never a straight line but a spiral upward.