Real estate tokenization
A building, divided. Ownership, provable.
Fractional property shares as permissioned tokens — KYC-gated transfers, documents attested by a named firm, and rent paid to whoever held the shares when it was earned. The legal wrapper comes first, always.
N° 01Where these projects fail
Not on the contract. On the wrapper
RealT tokenized around 700 mostly-Detroit properties, raised roughly $140m from more than fourteen thousand investors, and entered voluntary liquidation in July 2026 with under $640,000 left in escrow. Its architecture was almost exactly what most agencies will sell you: a whitelisted ERC-20, one LLC per property, rent paid in stablecoin.
Nothing cryptographic failed. It failed on deferred maintenance, unpaid property taxes, code violations, and allegations that some marketed properties were never bought. The contracts did what they were told.
That is the shape of the risk, and it is why we start with the structure rather than the token. If the SPV does not hold title, the token conveys nothing — and no amount of test coverage changes that.
N° 02What we build
Five contracts, one property
01
The share token
A permissioned ERC-20 where every movement is gated in the transfer hook and balances are checkpointed, so income can be measured at a past instant without ever iterating the holder list.
02
The identity register
Who may hold at all: country, accreditation status, KYC expiry, sanctions freeze. It records the outcome of a check performed by a licensed provider — it does not perform one, and we will not pretend it does.
03
The rule engine
Accreditation gates, holder caps, jurisdiction allowlists, holding periods, concentration limits. Which of these bind is your counsel's answer, and the engine returns a readable reason for every rejection so a subscriber learns why before spending gas.
04
The property register
Title deed, appraisal, inspection and insurance hashed on-chain, each attestation naming the firm that signed it and timestamped. Withdrawing one leaves the record standing.
05
Issuance and income
Escrowed subscription with a soft cap and refunds, so the issuer is only paid once the raise actually clears — and snapshot-based distribution so the person who sold last week still receives last quarter's rent.
N° 03Attestation
What a chain proves, and what it doesn't
A blockchain can prove a document with a given hash existed at a given time, and that a named party vouched for it. That is genuinely useful: nobody can quietly swap an appraisal after an investor commits.
It cannot prove the document is true. No amount of cryptography verifies that a surveyor measured the building honestly, or that the deed in the PDF is the deed on file at the registry.
So we build the register to make that trust legible rather than to imply it away. Every attestation names its attestor and timestamp, only the firm that signed one may withdraw it, and a revocation leaves the record visible — so an investor who bought on a since-withdrawn appraisal can still see that it happened. The security is a named professional's licence and liability, off-chain, and the product should say so.
N° 04Income
Rent follows the calendar, not the cap table
Paying whoever holds shares on payout day is the obvious approach and it is wrong. Someone who sold last week still earned last quarter's rent, and a buyer should not receive income from a period they did not own.
Each distribution pins a timestamp and reads entitlement from the token's balance history at that instant. Shares that change hands afterwards do not move the entitlement. The snapshot is taken one second in the past, so a transfer later in the same block cannot shift it.
Claims are pull-based. The holder list is unbounded, and a payout that loops over it can be bricked by its own success — which is a failure mode that only appears once the raise has gone well.
N° 05The registry problem
The one design that closes the gap
Dubai's Land Department, working with a VARA-licensed operator, put title-deed tokens on a public ledger with the operator integrated directly into the department's own systems, and opened secondary resale in February 2026. It is the only live design we know of where the token is registry-recognised ownership rather than an attestation about a document.
Everywhere else — including everything we build — the token is a claim on an entity that holds title, and the link between the two is legal paperwork rather than code. That is not a flaw to engineer around. It is the actual state of the art, and a project that understands it will make better decisions than one sold on the idea that the chain is the register.
Investment
Fixed scope. No drift.
From $55,000 — one property, one SPV, issuance and distribution.
- Permissioned share token with compliance in the transfer hook
- Identity register with expiry and sanctions handling
- Rule engine configured to your counsel's exemption
- Property register with revocable, attributed attestations
- Escrowed issuance with soft cap and refunds
- Snapshot-based income distribution
- Investor subscription flow and issuer console
- Testnet deployment with verified source
- Specification, threat model and known-issues document
- 30-day defect warranty
Questions
The answers we give most often.
- Do we need an SPV per property?
- Almost always, and it is the first thing to sort out. The token represents membership interests in an entity that holds title, so one entity per property keeps the liability, the accounting and the cap table separable. Pooling several properties into one vehicle changes what you are selling — investors are buying a fund rather than a building — and that changes the exemption you file under. Your counsel decides; we build to their answer.
- How do investors actually get paid?
- Rent arrives off-chain in fiat, is converted to a stablecoin, and is funded into the distribution contract in one transaction. Each holder then claims their share. We use pull-based claims rather than pushing payments, because pushing means iterating a holder list that has no upper bound — it works for the first fifty investors and fails for the five hundredth.
- Can investors sell their shares?
- Technically yes, subject to whatever the rule engine enforces — lockups, jurisdiction restrictions, accreditation, holder caps. Practically, liquidity is the unsolved problem in this category. Across every fractional property token tracked anywhere there were around 133 monthly active addresses in mid-2026. Tokenization has solved distribution and recordkeeping. It has not solved secondary liquidity, and a plan that assumes it has is a plan with a hole in it.
- What happens if an investor loses their wallet?
- The issuer moves the holding to a replacement address. That is a required capability rather than a flaw — the investor still legally owns the asset, and a register that cannot be corrected stops matching reality. We bound it: the recipient must still pass every eligibility rule, so a recovery cannot place shares with an unaccredited holder or into a barred jurisdiction. We also carry the income entitlement across, because the balance history the payout reads cannot be rewritten by moving the shares.
- Which jurisdiction should we tokenize in?
- Not our call, and be sceptical of an agency that answers it quickly. The variables are the exemption you can use, where your investors are, where the property is, and who will act as transfer agent. What we can tell you is what each answer costs in engineering: a Reg D 506(c) offering needs an accreditation gate and a holder cap, Reg S needs a jurisdiction allowlist that excludes US persons, and Rule 144 style holding periods need a lockup. Those are configuration, not rewrites, provided the engine was built to take them.
- Can you connect the token to the land registry?
- Only where a registry offers that, which today is essentially Dubai. Everywhere else the honest architecture is an attestation layer: hashed documents, named attestors, timestamps, and a product that is clear about the difference. We would rather build that and say what it is than build something that looks like a registry link and is not.
Next step
The token is a claim on an entity that holds title. Without that, it conveys nothing.
Tell us the property, the jurisdictions your investors sit in, and whether counsel is engaged.