With Ownera’s recent rollout with LRC Group, Apex, and Archax, you are tokenising a real estate fund, an asset class often burdened by illiquidity and high minimum investment thresholds. From an institutional distribution perspective, how does issuing this vehicle natively on GS DAP alter fractionalisation capabilities or minimum ticket sizes for global allocators?
One of the biggest barriers from an investment strategy perspective is always a lack of product.
We have great analytics and a kind of smartness around portfolio optimisation and allocation, but often it’s very difficult to buy the actual individual assets that are needed to construct that portfolio. Even with ETFs and funds of funds, it does not necessarily mean that it is correlated to your specific investment thesis.
Having an allocation in real estate is naturally one of the things that should be invested in, but it’s very expensive, very hard to do, and often the way you hold real estate is not an effective, efficient mechanism. We have an emotional attachment to holding real estate because we live in it, but I believe the better option is to rent somewhere and let someone else manage your money, as you would benefit from a far greater return on investment than you would if you held your own property.
If you look at real estate investment trusts (REITs), it tends to be more than just pure property; they might be wind farms, power stations, or other clean energy ventures. With the LRC deal, they have tokenised some prime residential properties in London — the white houses with beautiful facades in the Chelsea area. Typically, you might need £20 million just to get through the door, but by tokenising those assets and issuing them via a traditional securitisation structure out of Luxembourg, we’ve enabled fractional ownership.
The minimum investment ticket is £100,000, which we believe is game-changing. It opens access to a broader investor base, all while leaving the underlying property and its management with LRC and its teams.
We picked Luxembourg because of its reputation as a thought leader when it comes to recognising tokens and having a robust framework for the issuance of digitally native securities.
The Commission de Surveillance du Secteur Financier (CSSF) has also been very progressive in how it looks at regulating these instruments. Even though the world has shifted since we started this project, Luxembourg still stands as the preferred destination for this type of issuance.
There is often an assumption that GS DAP runs solely on the Canton Network. Can you explain the infrastructure behind this transaction and why a multi-chain approach was needed?
While GS is part of Canton, the project required a combination of different networks to facilitate distribution.
The real intention behind this project was to show that multi-chain is the solution. GS DAP is still leveraging a private chain for the transfer agent, which maintains its digital record of ownership, but the buy side necessitated access via public chains.
What we have done is facilitate transactions via public key management solutions through our distributor network, with the TA maintaining the golden source, but the tokens themselves are intended to be as mobile as possible across different environments: private, public, and different custodians and distributors.
Our first distributor is Archax; we have BPX lined up, and we also have some counterparties in Asia looking to be distributors. Ultimately, the idea is that these tokens will possess a high level of cross-chain global mobility.
Mobility and interoperability are key benefits of tokenisation that seem to come up again and again, alongside efficiency and settlement times. Why, in your view, is a multi-chain approach beneficial to the tokenised real estate fund, as opposed to it being on a single chain?
Fundamentally, tokenisation is about mobility. It is taking something that, at its core, is hard to settle, and turning it into an asset that is now mobile; you can transfer ownership at the press of a button, in some cases settling in seconds. It gives asset managers the leverage without having to create different liens for loan documentation, for example, or to have the asset in overnight funding or term-based financing in a more structured arrangement.
A lot of projects are tokenisation for tokenisation’s sake. They do not solve for distribution, for the utility of the token after its issuance, or for the multi-chain, multi-faceted needs of different participants, who are subject to different regulatory and technological constraints.
Instead, with our project, we’ve ensured it is not trapped in someone else’s silo, and it is not limited to a single custodian. Without true market interoperability, it is not a true tokenised product.
With tokenisation transitioning out of pilot phases and into production-grade infrastructure, what do you think is the ultimate bottleneck of the technology in today’s markets, and how can it be addressed?
We know the technology works, we know it can interoperate, and we know it can do genuinely useful things.
So what is the bottleneck?
In my view, there are two main constraints. The first is on the investor side: Institutional investors have been slow to adopt, often due to their mandates and operational processes that were not built for tokenised assets.
The second is compliance-centred: the slew of regulatory challenges that still need to be addressed. For example, there are not sufficient procedures in place that allow us to use Undertakings for Collective Investment in Transferable Securities (UCITS) funds for purchasing tokenised assets.
This takes out a swathe of real money accounts that could be investing.
I also believe that it is important to conduct tokenisation initiatives in a thoughtful manner. Often, these programmes are good for PR but hollow in outcome — lacking in application for balance sheets, collateral mobility, or funding efficiency. Instead, we want them to result in true utility and advance the market.
At Ownera, we have been working with the Global Digital Finance (GDF) industry body on a project for Europe and the UK that centred around using tokenised money market funds (MMFs) as collateral in derivatives margin.
This year, we extended that to the US, concluding with three large-scale simulations: variation margin using tokenised MMFs, cleared initial margin posted to central counterparty clearing houses (CCPs), such as ICE and CME, and finally using initial margin with smart-contract-based control of locked collateral.
Approximately 150 institutions and 450 individuals were involved in working on the simulations, which are moving into production through the Open Collateral Network — a consortium of different institutions building a multi-chain collateral environment to connect legacy systems to blockchain rails.
The market is aligned that 2025 was the year of proof of concept, 2026 is the year of production deployment, and 2027 is the year of scale-up.
I think that is broadly correct. You can see it reflected in major banks implementing digital asset leads, modifying their budgets, and initiating live projects.
The market is moving, and the rhetoric is changing. Six months ago, the consensus was that you had to be onchain.
Now, you have to be multi-chain.
The Bank for International Settlements has popularised the idea of a ‘unified ledger’ — a single state‑backed environment where tokenised real‑world assets and central bank digital currencies coexist. Do you see capital markets gravitating towards a small number of state‑backed platforms, or will open and routable networks remain a permanent necessity?
I am a proponent of a multi-chain environment. I feel that it would be challenging to envision a world in which a central bank — or any single public entity — becomes the orchestrator of global capital markets infrastructure.
I think that it is reflected in the investments made by banks — particularly in the US — that signal it will not be an easy shift to move these entities into a single or a small set of environments.
Take a look at the Global Layer One (GL1) initiative; thee idea of a unified ledger is good on paper, but, actually, the practical execution is muddied in political complexities.
Ultimately, institutions will pick the technology that is most suited to their needs. Speed, resilience, connections, functionality, or the application layer all act as different capabilities suited to different entities for different use cases.
I think that it is important to remember that not everything necessitates being onchain. Take intraday repo, for example, you do not expect traders to pre-move their assets into Bloomberg or Tradeweb just to transact; you trade on a venue, and then you settle.
In the future, you will not need a single chain to do that; cash and assets can live on different chains, synchronised for settlement. That is still a multi-chain model.
Finally, on a more personal note: if you weren’t working in institutional finance and capital markets, what would you be doing?
Throughout my career, I’ve stepped away from mainstream finance a couple of times, always to try and do something with a more obvious social impact.
When I was in Singapore, I ran a yoga and mindfulness business. Prior to that, I worked with non-governmental organisations (NGOs) on using stablecoins and biometric technology to fund relief efforts in hard-to-reach jurisdictions like Afghanistan and Syria, and I think these experiences shaped how I view finance from a social enterprise perspective.
I truly believe that what we do in finance has a greater purpose than making money for banks. The technology that we are developing can — and should — be used for social good and inclusion, and that is where my true passion lies.
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