Someone rediscovers real estate during every crypto cycle. The pitch is usually the same. Take a large building, slice it into tokens, and liquidity will follow.
But as people learned the hard way with luxury resort tokens in 2018 and again with fractionalized rental properties in 2021, tokenization didn’t magically create buyers. Secondary listings took a while to materialize, and when they did, trading activity was often thin. Investors were left holding tokens with presumed value, but no practical way to exit.
Smaller ticket sizes certainly make assets more accessible, but access alone doesn’t create liquidity. Real liquidity comes from exits, either through a clearly defined redemption mechanism or a deep secondary market with willing buyers. Fractionalization is a means to an end, not the elixir.
For real estate, the biggest blocker to liquidity is lack of standardization. Every property is different. Two buildings on the same block can have entirely different profiles depending on tenant mix, zoning, or vintage. These differences make assets difficult to compare, which is why transactions are slow and often routed through expensive intermediaries.
And yet, real estate keeps drawing investors. It generates steady cash flow, benefits from depreciation and other favorable tax treatment, and provides tangible collateral for leverage.
Most importantly, it’s real. You can walk through it, and it puts money in your pocket every month. In a financial system increasingly dominated by synthetic exposures and paper claims, a physical asset with both utility and investment value feels refreshingly concrete.
The real question was never whether real estate could be added on blockchains, but how. And in this cycle, people are answering that question differently.
Instead of tokenizing individual properties and hoping for price appreciation, token issuers are focusing on yield.
This makes the assets look less like speculative NFT and more like a yield bearing financial instrument, comparable to money market or private credit products that have gained traction onchain. Rent-paying tenants generate real-world cash flows, offering another source of return that doesn’t depend on token incentives or circular dynamics for DeFi.
Structures are evolving accordingly:
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Rather than issuing perpetual equity tokens with no clear exit, many players now favor debt instruments with defined maturities and redemption mechanics.
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More offerings are tied to development or value-add strategies where refinancing or equity take-outs are part of the business plan.
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Others pool multiple properties into a single vehicle instead of tokenizing assets one by one.
Together, these changes smooth cash flows, reduce property-specific risk, and make the assets more comparable and fungible.
Secondary markets remain the primary bottleneck, but this challenge isn’t unique to real estate and applies broadly across tokenized assets. As the industry’s focus shifts toward liquidity and market structure, there is reason for optimism that this gap will narrow over time. We’re still in the early innings.
🌐View the Real Estate Dashboard🌐
At launch, our real estate dashboard tracks 8 platforms that have tokenized 58 real estate assets across 7 networks.
The products span a wide range:
Structurally, some offerings represent interests in investment vehicles holding one or more properties, while others use direct deed tokenization, recording ownership onchain through specialized regulatory framework developed in coordination with local governments.
Our real estate section follows the same structure as other asset classes on the platform, but includes metrics specific to real estate.
A global map shows where underlying properties are located. Each listing highlights the city, jurisdiction, asset type, property type, and investment strategy, making it easier to distinguish and compare offerings.
We’ve tried to capture these distinctions, because not all tokenized real estate is created equal. And investors deserve transparency into what they are actually buying.
We are excited to continue expanding coverage as new products come to market. We are cautiously optimistic to see how these models and structures continue to evolve in this cycle.
Please reach out with questions or thoughts. We welcome your feedback.
