Real estate and art

Real estate and art were some of the first assets people talked about tokenizing. The idea is simple: split a building or a painting into many tokens, so people can buy a small piece instead of the whole thing. In 2018, the owner of the St. Regis Aspen Resort in Colorado offered a stake of about 19% in the hotel as tokens on Ethereum. Only accredited investors, people wealthy enough to be allowed to buy private investments, could take part.

In practice, it’s been harder than it sounds. Legal ownership of a building is still recorded in a government land registry, not on a blockchain, so the token’s link to the property depends on legal agreements. And while tokens can be traded easily, there often haven’t been enough buyers and sellers to make that trading useful.

These projects still teach useful lessons. They show the value of owning a fraction of something, and they show that the legal link between a token and its asset matters as much as the technology. Most institutional work has since moved to financial assets like deposits, funds, Treasuries and loans. Those are already digital records, so they’re a more natural fit for a blockchain.