Real-World example

Suppose we disregard Smart Contracts and Blockchain for a minute. Let us say you want to invest in real estate, but your opening investment is $20,000, and you plan on gradually increasing your investment each month. Indeed, with the traditional real estate market, this is quite inconvenient to do. How do you expect to buy a few square meters of an apartment?

Suppose we reverse the situation. Imagine that you own a property — say an apartment in central London, and you would like to raise some funds to renovate the property. The apartment is valued at $2,000,000 but you need $100,000. Raising the necessary funds may be awkward.

We now decide to tokenize the $2,000,000 apartment into 2,000,000 tokens (the number is optional, we could have issued 20,000 tokens). Thus, each token represents a 0.00005% share of the underlying asset.

Finally, we issue the tokens on a Smart Contract supporting platform, like Ethereum, so that the tokens can be freely bought and sold on different exchanges. When you buy one token, you buy 0.00005% of the ownership in the asset. If you buy 1,000,000 tokens, you own 50% of the asset. Buy all 2,000,000 tokens, and you are 100% owner of the asset. Blockchain is an immutable public ledger. It ensures that nobody can "erase" your ownership once you have bought tokens even if it is not registered on a government-run registry.

Thus, to conclude this example, we took an asset, tokenized it, and created its digital representation that lives on Blockchain. Blockchain guarantees that the ownership information is immutable.

Why is the market shifting to tokenization?

No territorial barriers

Investors can invest in the property mentioned above or other assets while being located in another part of the world without physically visiting. Thus investment becomes secure, quick and straightforward.

Elimination of brokers

Trading assets can take days or even months to accomplish a settlement. It requires external entities to verify the documentation of transactions and investor's eligibility, which adds additional expenses to the process. However, tokenization eliminates the requirement for intermediaries with Blockchain's ability to provide immutability and transparency.

Fractional Ownership

Assets become highly divisible when digitalized. Therefore, investors can invest in small to large percentages of tokenized assets. For example, you can buy a 5% share of a tokenized painting or real estate property.

Improved liquidity

Blockchain presents a low-friction environment for investments. Asset tokenization facilitates the automated transfer of ownership while guaranteeing compliance. Tokenized assets benefit from reduced complexity and expenses, and the opportunity to invest with fiat money and P2P trading on regulated exchanges, thus improving liquidity.

Quick and cheaper transactions

Since token transactions and transfers are completed with Smart Contracts, the exchange process is automated and simple. Automation reduces the difficulties associated with purchasing and selling and requires no intermediaries. As a result, deal executions are simple and have low transaction fees.

Broader Investor Base

Since asset tokenization allows for fractional ownership, virtually anyone can become an investor, allowing them to diversify their investment portfolio into assets that they could not previously afford.

What can be tokenized?

No territorial barriers

Investors can invest in the property mentioned above or other assets while being located in another part of the world without physically visiting. Thus investment becomes secure, quick and straightforward.

Accessible 24/7

Access Tokenized assets 24/7 from anywhere in the world.

Immutable

Once someone buys the tokens, ownership is guaranteed and can easily be transferred to a new owner. In case of any disputes, conflicts can be resolved immediately by viewing at immutable ownership records.

100% Transparent

No one can profess to own assets fraudulently as each transaction is stored and maintained on a shared, immutable ledger. Transparency within the ecosystem ensures that everyone has a clear view of the maintained ledger of ownership records.

Cost-effective

Tokenized assets eliminate the involvement of intermediaries that regularly restrict investment accessibility. Therefore, it reduces the traditionally high fees by 65% and brings clarity to the process.

Easy to invest

Tokenized assets allow greater liquidity with the opportunity of fractional ownership and thus eliminates the need for minimum investments.