Few mere mortals know what it means. But the real estate investment trust of old is going digital. Tokenized real estate – long touted but slow to materialize – is gaining real traction, pushed ahead by Wall Street rather than by the usual blockchain bros.
Tokenized real estate means taking a real property — like a rental home, apartment building, or commercial property — and turning ownership shares of that property into digital tokens on a blockchain. In an ideal world, it would allow an American investor to speculate on Singapore real estate in the digital realm.
Major traditional finance firms are publicly embracing the idea.
BlackRock CEO Larry Fink said on CNBC recently that, “we’re at the beginning of the tokenization of all assets like real estate.”
Regulators seem to be moving in favor of tokenization. U.S. legislation – namely the GENIUS Act – is clearing legal paths for blockchain based transactions and even the Nasdaq has applied to let institutional traders settle securities on a blockchain by 2026.
An older 2023 study by a McKinney, Texas-headquartered blockchain IT solutions company called ScienceSoft Finance said some 80% of high-net-worth and two-thirds of institutional investors surveyed were looking at tokenized assets, with real estate frequently cited as a target.
For years, tokenized real estate struggled because most projects tried to sell investors fractional ownership of physical property. No one wanted that, said Artem Tolkachev, Chief Real World Assets Officer for Falcon Finance in London. “Investors don’t actually want tiny pieces of buildings – they want yield, predictable cash flows, and a financial product they can underwrite. Early projects focused on the asset; investors cared about the economics.”
Nathaniel Sokoll-Ward, co-founder and CEO of Manifest, a blockchain protocol that makes American assets crypto compatible, said global institutional investors like the on-chain idea because it allows them to trade easily when the traditional market is closed.
Relatively mature startups like Florida-based RealToken Technologies‘ tokenized properties pay rental income weekly instead of the quarterly dividends typical of the publicly traded REITs.
“ETFs benefit from high liquidity during regular market hours, which are limited. While some platforms enable extended hours, liquidity can be low to nonexistent, and bid-ask spreads can be wide. Tokenized real estate disrupts this model by facilitating continuous trading that operates 24/7. Investors can respond to real-time market shifts — a critical advantage in today’s always-on financial landscape.” – Nathaniel Sokoll-Ward, CEO of Manifest, Wealth Management magazine, April 24, 2025.
New entrants are forming. USA REIT Markets from Connecticut launched an SEC-regulated blockchain exchange for commercial real estate, using Reg A+ and Reg D frameworks to offer daily liquidity for tokenized CRE securities. CRE stands for income producing Commercial Real Estate.
Globally, the tokenized real estate movement is accelerating.
Dubai has long pushed real estate tokenization. United Arab Emirates government initiatives on the XRP Ledger aim to put roughly 7% of Dubai’s real estate value on-chain by 2033.
In Singapore, the ADDX platform began listing tokenized REIT shares this year. ADDX and Boston Consulting Group have been promoting this market heavily since 2022. At the time, the two forecast in a report that asset tokenization as a business opportunity would grow 50 times to $16.1 trillion by 2030, which is less than five years away. The Deloitte Center for Financial Services forecasts real estate tokenization to count for around $4 trillion of the tokenization market by 2035.
“This market is in its infancy, but expanding at a rapid rate,” said Ivo Grigorov, co-founder of Real Finance in Vilnius, Lithuania. The company is part of the growing trend of “on-chain real-world assets” that has taken shape this year.
Grigorov predicts that 2026 will witness further tokenization of Treasury markets, private credit and lending, trade finance, commodities, investment funds, insurance and risk pools, and an expansion of institutional grade stable digital assets.
“The real shift this year was moving from tokenizing property to tokenizing the income the property produces – giving you rental streams, and new markets for senior loans, and even mortgage securitizations,” said Tolkachev. “Once you package those flows into a regulated on-chain instrument, the behavior looks more like private CRE or private credit than it does public REITs. You get the same underlying economics, but with lower minimums, more transparent data, and earlier-stage secondary liquidity,” he said.
For cryptocurrency investors with high risk appetite, this may be a new market to dabble in next year. Tokenization of real estate is happening. Fair warning, Tolkachev notes to early-entry investors: “Tokenized real estate is still lacking the scale, diversification and daily liquidity of the traditional, publicly listed REITs.”
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