Real estate is now one of the most watched corners of the real-world asset market. But turning property into tokens is not some copy-paste version of what crypto has already done with U.S. Treasuries, money market funds, or private credit. Real estate behaves differently. Cash flow. Valuation. Legal ownership. Daily operations. All of that shapes what can be issued, how it can be run, and whether any secondary market can exist in the first place.
That split helps explain why real estate tokenization is still pretty early. Property-rights registration, local rules, and everyday asset management all remain off-chain. The token is just one piece of a much bigger setup. With that in mind, PANews spoke with Sonia Shaw, chief executive of OneAsset, a Dubai-based RWA tokenization company building compliance-first infrastructure for institutional-grade commercial real estate, or CRE.
OneAsset is taking a different tack from projects built around tiny-ticket fragmentation or simple token issuance rails. It is putting the focus back where it belongs: on the property, and on the off-chain structure holding the whole thing together. Under the company’s model, each property would sit in its own single-asset vault, with its own SPV, its own independent valuation, and its own disclosure package covering leases and operations. The goal is to tie a digital investment instrument to economic rights that are enforceable through legal documents.
Its second big belief is straightforward: fragmentation does not equal liquidity. A real secondary market still needs good property, stable cash flow, ongoing disclosure, and enough buyer demand. So no, tradability is not the endgame. The platform is trying to make property interests easier to price, check, transfer, and reallocate through regulated infrastructure.
Why OneAsset is starting with commercial real estate
Real estate is one of the biggest stores of wealth on the planet. Citing Savills data, PANews said global real estate was worth about $393.3 trillion at the end of 2024, with commercial real estate making up about $58.5 trillion. It also pointed to an MSCI report released this August showing that income-producing commercial real estate managed by institutional investors reached $13.5 trillion in 2025, the first increase since 2021.
And yet, despite that size, commercial property is still among the least liquid asset classes. In traditional markets, investors usually get exposure through private real estate funds or publicly traded REITs. Private funds often use blind-pool structures, where the manager picks the assets, and capital can be locked up for seven to 10 years. Public REITs trade on stock exchanges, yes, but investors are buying a portfolio assembled by a manager, and prices can swing with the broader equity market.
For institutional allocators, the issue goes beyond simple exposure to real estate. They want answers. Who manages the asset? How is the income produced? What risks sit behind that income? What recourse is there if things break down? And can they get out when they need liquidity? Shaw said those concerns shape both OneAsset’s underwriting and the way it builds products.
Rather than use a pooled-fund format, the company wants isolated, single-asset commercial real estate vaults tied directly to specific properties. Each vault would carry its own audited valuation, income profile, risk parameters, and legal terms. Qualified investors would use one unified account to assess, subscribe to, and trade exposure to a specific property.
PANews said some tokenized real estate projects in recent years tried to push on-chain properties that had failed to attract capital through traditional routes, pitching tokenization as another way to get them sold. OneAsset does not buy that. Shaw put it bluntly: “If an asset is not worth investing in offline, putting it on-chain will not suddenly make it investment-worthy” ("Ru guo yi xiang zi chan zai xian xia bu zhi de tou zi, shang lian zhi hou ye bu hui tu ran bian de you tou zi jia zhi"). She said on-chain infrastructure can make a strong investment run more efficiently, but it cannot turn a bad property into a good one.
Shaw has more than 15 years of experience across traditional finance, international market expansion, and real estate funds, and she is leading the company’s push to build what she calls “regulation by design” market infrastructure. OneAsset’s decision to begin with UAE commercial real estate, instead of spreading across several countries and asset classes, comes down to four reasons.
- Commercial properties usually come with longer leases and stricter screening of corporate tenants, which can lead to relatively stable and predictable recurring income.
- The company wants underwriting driven by data. In some Dubai free zones, the number of corporate visas available is linked in part to how much office space a company occupies, creating a structural link between business expansion and demand for workspace. OneAsset sees that as one factor supporting lease demand and property values.
- Compared with assets that already have better liquidity, high-quality commercial real estate has long had high entry barriers, capital lockups, and limited financing channels at the single-asset level, which makes the efficiency gain from tokenization easier to spot.
- Sticking to one market and one asset class helps the firm avoid weakening underwriting capability through cross-border and cross-category expansion, while building a steadier sourcing pipeline and operator network.
The company also sees asset selection and distribution as inseparable. Different properties bring different lease structures, cash-flow patterns, and operating risks, so they fit different kinds of investors. In that framework, the first question is not what can technically be put on-chain. It is which assets have a clear economic model, visible demand, and a believable path to distribution.
How OneAsset sees the current market
Shaw sorted today’s real estate RWA players into three broad groups.
The first group is retail-facing fractionalization platforms, with Lofty named as one example. These platforms break single-family homes or small rental properties into low-cost digital interests. Shaw said that model improves access, but having a large number of investors holding one property can make governance and operational coordination messy, while returns still depend on tenants, maintenance, and the residential market.
The second group is white-label technology providers such as Brickken. PANews described Brickken as offering SaaS, white-label, and API-based tokenization infrastructure covering legal structuring, issuance, compliance, investor management, governance, and distribution of proceeds across the asset lifecycle. Shaw said the real difference between OneAsset and those providers is not whether blockchain or smart contracts are involved. It is whether the platform itself is involved in sourcing, underwriting, and ongoing management of the underlying asset. OneAsset wants to be more than a tech vendor. It wants direct involvement in asset selection, structuring, and lifecycle management, while linking the asset side with investors through institutional-grade infrastructure.
The third group is integrated RWA infrastructure, represented in the article by Mavryk. PANews said Mavryk is building a dedicated Layer 1 for RWA use cases, while also using Equiteez to provide market infrastructure for both primary and secondary markets and extending into on-chain asset acquisition, digitization, and distribution through REIT funds. That takes the model beyond base-layer blockchain infrastructure and into asset origination and market distribution.
OneAsset is not building its own blockchain. It plans to launch first on Base, then add compatibility with more networks later depending on the asset, regulatory, and market setup. Shaw said the company would rather spend its resources on asset quality, legal structuring, and regulatory fit than on building a public chain.
On the investor side, OneAsset wants to begin with an institution-led model aimed mainly at family offices, fund-of-funds managers, and corporate treasury departments. Different buyers want different things. Institutional allocators may care more about asset safety and risk-adjusted returns. Crypto-native and cross-border investors may care more about access, transferability, and capital efficiency. So the company’s plan is to match each asset with investors whose goals fit that asset’s economics.
Before subscribing, investors would be able to review each vault’s net asset value, or NAV, valuation, tenant leases, and operating costs. They would subscribe directly to a specific vault instead of buying a blind-pool product holding several assets. After a tokenized asset has been subscribed, investors could either hold it long term or transfer part of their interest, as long as identity, jurisdiction, and transfer rules are satisfied and a buyer exists, without having to re-sign the full stack of legal documents used in an offline property transaction.
The token is not the title deed
Because the business model is still taking shape, real estate tokenization often gets flattened into the phrase “putting buildings on-chain.” OneAsset says that wording hides a basic fact: a token is not the same thing as the legal rights tied to property.
The company told PANews: “A vault token is not the same as direct statutory ownership of the building itself, and OneAsset will not describe it that way” ("Jin ku dai bi bing bu deng tong yu dui jian zhu wu ben shen de zhi jie fa ding chan quan, OneAsset ye bu hui ru ci miao shu"). In its view, trust from institutional counterparties starts with defining exactly what rights the instrument represents.
Under the proposed structure, when an investor acquires an asset-vault token, what they receive is a digital-native instrument representing economic exposure to a specific stand-alone commercial property. The enforceable claim sits in the legal structure beneath it, held through a dedicated SPV linked one-to-one with that property and designed to be bankruptcy remote. The real rights attached to the investment come from the vault’s legal documents and the SPV, not from the token alone.
The token’s job is to record ownership interests and make transfers easier. The whole structure is meant to keep the token lined up with legal claims, so the person holding the vault token is also the person recognized in the legal documents as the holder of the economic interest.
“Smart contracts can efficiently execute pre-set rules, but they cannot solve questions around local property rights, tax liabilities or bankruptcy proceedings,” Shaw said. If institutional investors and automated systems are expected to hold digital assets with confidence, she said, the off-chain structure has to be strong.
That is also why OneAsset stresses bankruptcy isolation. A properly designed SPV is meant to separate each property from other properties and from OneAsset’s own corporate operating condition, so investor rights tied to one property stay separate if the platform itself runs into trouble. For institutional investors, PANews wrote, this comes down to counterparty risk: whether legal recourse survives apart from the platform.
For real estate RWA, audited smart contracts matter. But investors still need practical answers. Who owns the property? Who collects the rent? How can an operator be replaced after a default? Who can investors pursue if the platform fails? Without those arrangements, the token is just a digital record, with no properly anchored claim behind it.
Starting with Dubai and writing compliance into the structure
Real estate is local. Heavily local. The property’s location, the SPV’s domicile, the investor’s location, and the venue where the token trades can all sit under different regulatory regimes. That makes cross-border issuance and transfer far more complicated than ordinary crypto assets.
OneAsset told PANews: “When choosing our first market, we were not simply chasing exposure to a particular region. We carried out a planned structural screening process. Dubai’s Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority (VARA) provided exactly this kind of clarity, allowing us to follow an uncompromising ‘regulation as design’ path” ("Wo men xuan ze shou ge shi chang shi, bing bu shi jian dan zhui qiu mou yi di qu de shi chang pu guang, er shi zuo le you ji hua de jie gou xing shai xuan. Di bai xu ni zi chan jian guan ju VARA qia hao ti gong le zhe zhong ming que xing, shi wo men neng gou guan che hao bu tuo xie de jian guan ji she ji de lu xian"). Dubai was chosen in part because it already has a dedicated regulatory framework for virtual assets. The company said it is pursuing the relevant application process with the Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority, or VARA, and is using the pre-approval period to refine its legal obligations and technical systems.
At the same time, OneAsset said it has obtained ISO/IEC 27001:2022 certification for its information security management system. That certification covers its cloud-hosted applications, back-end infrastructure, and the smart contracts used for on-chain operations. For investors, the company said, this means sensitive information and digital investment systems are managed under a formally assessed security framework rather than improvised internal controls.
As the platform expands into more jurisdictions, OneAsset expects to handle compliance through three programmatic layers.
- First, a permissioned, identity-aware token architecture that applies ownership controls, investor eligibility checks, and cross-border transfer rules at the token level, so compliance requirements travel with the asset instead of depending on a specific trading venue.
- Second, an automated eligibility review system that builds KYC/AML checks, regional investor classifications, and the applicable investor-qualification framework into onboarding.
- Third, a unified disclosure standard built around a vault-level asset-reporting engine that can be replicated across markets to meet disclosure demands from different regulators.
OneAsset argues that the problems exposed by some early real estate tokenization projects show this is not a one-off issuance event. After a property is tokenized, it still has to deal with repairs, insurance, taxes, and changes in vacancy. So the company plans infrastructure covering the full lifecycle of tokenized property, with special attention on ongoing operations, reporting, and asset management. It wants governance controls that can aggregate and standardize messy off-chain property metrics.
OneAsset also said: “OneAsset plans to introduce an independent NAV valuation for each asset vault. From tenant covenant terms and lease conditions to building structural maintenance costs, local taxes and fees, and cash-flow schedules, all key data will be system-verified and presented transparently” ("OneAsset ji hua wei mei ge zi chan jin ku yin ru du li de NAV gu zhi, cong zu hu yue shu tiao kuan he zu yue tiao jian, dao jian zhu jie gou wei hu cheng ben, dang di shui fei ji xian jin liu shi jian biao, ge xiang guan jian shu ju dou hui jing guo xi tong he yan bing yi tou ming fang shi zhan xian"). The company sees this reporting layer as core infrastructure, not an afterthought once issuance is done. It also plans to turn real estate valuations, lease data, and cash-flow information into machine-readable formats so asset performance can be assessed on an ongoing basis.
Liquidity comes from the property, not from splitting it up
Tokenized real-world assets have grown fast over the past two years. PANews cited RWA.xyz data showing that as of Aug. 26, 2026, distributed asset value for on-chain tokenized RWA stood at about $38.30 billion, while represented asset value was about $353.11 billion, roughly nine times larger. That gap shows the distance between assets announced as tokenized and assets that are actually on-chain and tradable.
Industry figures often lump together represented value — assets that have been announced or promised for tokenization but are not freely transferable — with assets that have truly made it on-chain and can trade. In real estate, that can be especially misleading. A building worth several hundred million dollars may appear in a cooperation agreement, but that does not mean the market already has the same amount of tradable tokens or real liquidity.
OneAsset’s answer is blunt: fragmentation is not liquidity. Slice up a property with weak buyer demand into millions of pieces, and you still have no market. You have just chopped the liquidity problem into smaller bits.
Liquidity begins with the property itself. Buyers are more likely to keep showing up when a property has a strong location, stable tenants, verifiable cash flow, and a reasonable valuation. The market also needs enough qualified buyers. Even if transfers are technically possible 24/7, investors still cannot exit if there is no counterparty on the order book.
Which means liquidity cannot be designed separately from distribution. A secondary market needs more than technical transferability. It also needs a capital base made up of qualified buyers across different investor groups and, possibly, different markets. And those buyers need a real reason to hold the underlying asset. PANews added that, as the market develops, use cases beyond secondary resale — including portfolio allocation, corporate treasury management, and compliant lending — could further widen demand.
OneAsset also draws a line between settlement efficiency and liquidity. T+0 atomic settlement and unified account infrastructure can make completed trades and capital reallocation more efficient, but they do not produce buyers or solve price discovery. Those are market problems. Smart contracts do not fix them by themselves.
From RWA to AiFi
Coinbase recently pushed the idea of on-chain agentic finance, or AiFi, into broader industry debate. In July, Coinbase co-founder and CEO Brian Armstrong described the Base network, USDC, and the x402 protocol on social media as core infrastructure for autonomous machine-to-machine payments by AI agents. PANews noted that those remarks came shortly before Coinbase reported second-quarter results. It also said Coinbase’s current definition of AiFi is focused mainly on payments and commercial settlement between agents, not asset allocation itself.
OneAsset is thinking about how that trend could stretch into investment allocation. At the Hack Seasons Cannes conference in April, the company’s chief investment officer, Arthur Katz, said that as more capital allocation is driven by AI, the transparency and programmability of on-chain assets could grow more important in institutional finance.
For Shaw, the bigger question is what assets those AI agents will eventually put capital into. In her view, an AI-driven financial system cannot rely on programmable money alone. It also needs programmable investment assets.
If a system cannot determine what a real estate token legally represents, who is allowed to hold it, how the property is valued, how much income it generates, what restrictions apply, and whether settlement can be completed, then that token is not really machine-readable. That is why OneAsset puts so much weight on standardizing valuation data, lease terms, cash flows, compliance information, and ownership records.
The near-term use case is better disclosure and stronger investment infrastructure. Over a longer stretch, tokenized real estate assets may become structured enough for software to screen, verify, and allocate them in a way that starts to resemble the work of a human portfolio manager. In that sense, AiFi does not start with AI. It starts with financial assets machines can actually understand.
PANews said real estate tokenization is shifting away from the obsession with issuance speed and low entry thresholds, and back toward the basics: asset quality, legal structuring, and long-term operations. Blockchain can shorten settlement times, cut some transfer costs, and make property interests easier to divide and program. But it cannot replace underwriting, property management, or legal enforcement.
OneAsset is trying to close those gaps through single-asset vaults, bankruptcy-remote SPVs, independent valuations, and ongoing data disclosure. Even so, according to the article, the design is still in testing and planning stages, and it still has to prove itself through live asset launches, regulatory approvals, and real secondary-market trading. In tokenized real estate, the hard part starts after the asset goes on-chain.