By Mari Hansen Over the past two years, a specific type of conference has been subtly growing in Miami, Dubai, and Singapore. The coffee is too strong, the carpet is too thick, and the men wearing pricey sneakers are no longer inquiring about square footage.
The weekly yield on tokenized apartment buildings is what they are interested in. You can tell something has changed just by looking at that picture. Wall Street has decided to stop making fun of the fact that real estate, the world’s slowest and most paper-bound asset class, is being rewritten in code.
| Snapshot: Real Estate Tokenization | Details |
|---|---|
| Category | Blockchain-based real-world asset (RWA) finance |
| Global tokenized RWA market (2026) | Approximately $27.6 billion and climbing |
| Projected real estate tokenization size (2035) | Nearly $4 trillion (Deloitte) |
| Major institutional players | BlackRock, JPMorgan, Apollo, KKR, Franklin Templeton, Hamilton Lane |
| Flagship product | BlackRock’s BUIDL fund, which grew from $400M to $2.9B in 2025 |
| Key regulatory milestones | GENIUS Act (stablecoin framework); Clarity Act (pending, 2026); SEC removing crypto from special-risk category |
| Leading infrastructure platforms | Securitize, DigiShares, Tokeny, Polymesh, RealT, Lofty |
| Typical retail entry point | As low as $50 per token on platforms like RealT and Lofty |
| Notable 2026 development | NYSE announcing a tokenized securities platform for 24-hour on-chain trading |
| Largest unsolved problem | Liquidity in secondary markets; cross-chain interoperability |
Almost without warning, the tone shifted. The tokenization of all assets is a matter of when, not if, according to Larry Fink, who previously rejected Bitcoin as a means of money laundering. A tokenized securities platform that would enable 24-hour on-chain trading of US stocks and ETFs was announced by the New York Stock Exchange in January. Nasdaq has submitted a blockchain-based securities settlement application. For institutional clients, JPMorgan’s Kinexys platform handles billions of settlements every day. Despite the lack of consensus, investors appear to think that something genuine is being constructed beneath all the technical terms.
By now, the pitch is practically practiced. A building could be locked inside an LLC, digital tokens representing fractional ownership could be created, and those tokens could be traded on a blockchain. Rent is distributed as stablecoins.
The back office is managed by smart contracts. Suddenly, a small investor in São Paulo can acquire a portion of a Tampa multifamily property. Everyone keeps using the word “democratization,” which is how it sounds. However, the details reveal a somewhat different picture.
In the US, accredited investors were the only ones allowed to participate in the majority of early tokenization transactions. In reality, the purported great opening of real estate to the general public was still a market for wealthy people dressed in brand-new clothing. In what was hailed as a breakthrough, the St. Regis Aspen Resort sold about 19% of itself as tokens for $18 million, but anyone reading the offering documents could see how narrow the door actually was. Strangely, Dubai has advanced more than the majority of American markets, with fractional entries as low as $545 and government-issued blockchain title deeds.
The liquidity issue is another issue that no one on the panel circuits wants to focus on. A token is only significant if someone wishes to repurchase it from you. Prices on secondary markets frequently deviate from the value of the underlying property, and secondary markets are still thin and dispersed across platforms that don’t communicate with one another. With Chainlink and a number of significant banks, SWIFT is currently testing cross-network transfers. The plumbing might eventually be fixed by it. The plumbing leaks for the time being.
It’s difficult to ignore the fact that institutions, not the original proponents of cryptocurrency, are driving a large portion of this. In February, Securitize, the company behind BlackRock’s BUIDL fund, was asked to tokenize loan interests associated with a hotel in the Maldives bearing the Trump brand. The financial and political strands continue to intertwine. The revolution that was promised in 2018 seems to have fallen short of expectations, but something more subdued and significant is emerging in its stead. It’s still unclear if it will democratize finance or just provide Wall Street with a quicker, less expensive way to transfer its own funds. The structures are still the same. The ledger has.