There’s no simple answer, I’d view it from 3 dimensions.
1. Registered assets vs. bearer assets
Most “important, real-world” assets (land titles, vehicles, shares in a private company) are registered assets: a legal registry decides who owns what. By contrast, L1 public chains were built for bearer assets (cash-like): whoever controls the key, controls the asset—permissionless and pseudonymous.
If a use case is inherently KYC’d and permissioned (e.g., a land office or notary registry), forcing it onto a permissionless, pseudonymous L1 is usually mismatched: you incur high costs to create a permissionless foundation only to revert back to serving permissioned scenarios. You pay more to get less.
I believe L2s and independent appchains are better suited for registered assets, as they can be customized to meet the specific demands of these assets by sacrificing some aspects of permissionlessness and decentralization.
Note: In my personal dictionary, “layer 1” refers exclusively to permissionless blockchains that allow for the issuance of censorship-resistant bearer assets. Many so-called “layer 1” blockchains are actually “appchains” because they lack censorship resistance and neutrality.
2. NFT vs. FT on a UTXO chain
On Cell/UTXO model, every output is effectively an NFT (like a unique banknote), even when it represents a fungible amount. That’s why non-fungible objects (licenses, tickets, memberships, warranties, media rights, “digital goods with unique state”) can be made very native and UX-smooth on CKB. Therefore, it appears that currently NFT assets and scenarios may better showcase CKB’s uniqueness.
3. Digital vs. Analog
Nervos has always emphasized an on-chain / off-chain balance, while “off-chain” includes both digital systems like Web2 and the analog world. I believe that within the crypto ecosystem, web2 holds greater importance than the analog world and should be prioritized for integration. This is especially true for aspects of web2 that are essentially assets but cannot fully become real assets due to Web2’s technological limitations, such as various digital creations. While integrating assets from the analog world is possible, asset management there is already well-established; this maturity means fewer problems to solve but also implies greater resistance from existing institutions.
Think out of the box and look for uniqueness
Considering all these, I am more optimistic about CKB finding a unique intersection in the scenario of bearer digital assets. Of course, these are not absolute principles; we can always think out of the box.
For example, Nervape is a bearer asset that anyone can hold and own; its on-chain form is NFT/DOB, providing an excellent experience on CKB (e.g., DOB comes with transaction fees and can exist forever), while its off-chain form is a very special physical figurine connected to its on-chain form through 3D modeling and digital chips, becoming a kind of bearer digital+analog asset.
The emergence of Fiber and improvements in the Cell model can also present unique advantages for fungible token and scenarios on Nervos. I have always been optimistic about profit sharing contracts, but I believe the main factor hindering their true implementation is the privacy issue that I often mention—most businesses would not be willing to use profit sharing contracts without privacy, no matter how perfect and trustless their calculations are. Privacy happens to be a natural strength of channel networks like Fiber.