Today, RWA (Real World Assets) has become a shared focus for both the crypto industry and traditional finance. However, "asset tokenization" is not a one-size-fits-all, standardized model. The distinct characteristics of underlying assets—such as cash flow patterns, valuation methods, legal ownership structures, and operational complexity—determine the unique challenges faced in the issuance, management, and secondary trading of various RWAs.
U.S. Treasury bonds, money market funds, and private credit, with their relatively standardized cash flows, valuations, and legal structures, have achieved scale first. Real estate, in contrast, involves multiple layers including property registration, property management, and local regulations, making on-chain tokens just one part of the entire system.
This places real estate tokenization in a relatively early stage. Core industry challenges remain: how legal rights are enforced, how off-chain assets are managed continuously, and how secondary market liquidity is formed.
As real estate tokenization gradually shifts from technological narratives back to examining asset quality, legal rights, and operational fundamentals, PANews engaged in a dialogue with Sonia Shaw, CEO of OneAsset, a commercial real estate tokenization project. Headquartered in Dubai, OneAsset is an RWA tokenization company dedicated to building compliance-first market infrastructure for institutional-grade commercial real estate (CRE).
Unlike many real estate RWA projects focusing on low-barrier asset fragmentation or token issuance tools, OneAsset refocuses on the underlying asset itself and its off-chain execution framework. Initially, OneAsset primarily targets premium commercial real estate in Dubai. Under its design, each property will be placed in an independent single-asset vault, accompanied by a specially established SPV (Special Purpose Vehicle), independent valuation, and disclosures of leases and operational information. This connects digital investment certificates to economically enforceable legal rights.
Another core conviction at OneAsset is that asset fragmentation does not automatically equate to liquidity. A truly sustainable secondary market still depends on the quality of the underlying property, stable cash flows, continuous information disclosure, and sufficient buyer demand.
Therefore, the platform does not view "tradability" as the end goal. Instead, it aims to make real estate equity easier to price, verify, transfer, and reallocate through compliant infrastructure.
Regarding core issues such as asset selection, legal rights, off-chain operations, and secondary liquidity, Sonia Shaw explained OneAsset's specific design to PANews and shared her perspective on the current bottlenecks and future development path of real estate tokenization.
Focusing on Asset Quality: OneAsset's Strategy for Commercial Real Estate RWA
Real estate is one of the largest global stores of wealth. According to Savills data, by the end of 2024, the total global real estate value was approximately $393.3 trillion, with commercial real estate valued at about $58.5 trillion. A report released by MSCI in August this year indicated that the global scale of commercial real estate managed by institutional investors for investment returns reached $13.5 trillion in 2025, marking the first increase since 2021.
However, despite its massive size, commercial real estate remains one of the least liquid asset classes.
In the traditional model, investors typically participate through private real estate funds or publicly traded REITs (Real Estate Investment Trusts). Private funds often employ blind-pool structures where the manager selects specific assets, and capital lock-up periods can range from 7 to 10 years. Public REITs are tradable on stock exchanges, but investors hold shares in a portfolio of assets managed by the REIT, and prices are susceptible to overall stock market volatility.
For institutional asset allocators, the issue is not just whether they *can* invest in real estate. They are more concerned with: who manages the asset, how returns are generated, what risks underlie those returns, what recourse mechanisms exist if problems arise, and whether liquidity can be achieved smoothly when exiting. These questions collectively shape OneAsset's asset selection approach and product design logic.
OneAsset does not intend to replicate the traditional pooled fund model. Instead, it aims to establish isolated, single commercial real estate asset vaults directly corresponding to specific physical properties. Each vault will have its own independent audit valuation, return profile, risk parameters, and legal terms. Qualified investors can evaluate, subscribe to, and trade specific commercial properties through a unified account.
In recent years, some real estate tokenization projects have attempted to bring properties that traditionally struggle to attract capital onto the blockchain, framing tokenization as an alternative path to market.
OneAsset explicitly rejects this approach. Its CEO Sonia Shaw articulates a principle: If an asset is not worthy of investment offline, it will not suddenly become worthy just by being put on-chain. She points out that on-chain infrastructure can amplify the operational efficiency of quality investments but cannot turn subpar real estate into quality assets.
Sonia Shaw brings over 15 years of experience in traditional finance, international market expansion, and real estate funds, and is responsible for driving the company's "regulation-by-design" market infrastructure.
Compared to platforms covering multiple countries and asset classes simultaneously, OneAsset initially focuses on commercial real estate in the UAE, primarily for four reasons:
First, commercial properties typically have longer lease terms and undergo stricter corporate tenant due diligence, providing relatively stable, predictable recurring income. Second, the platform aims to rely on a data-driven underwriting system to filter markets and assets. In certain Dubai free zones, there is a structural link between the quota of corporate visas a company can obtain and its actual office space, creating a connection between corporate expansion and office space demand. OneAsset views this as a factor supporting rental demand and, consequently, asset valuation in the locality.
Third, compared to assets that already possess good liquidity, premium commercial real estate has long been constrained by high barriers to entry, capital lock-ups, and limited financing channels for single assets. Tokenization can bring clearer efficiency gains here. Finally, by concentrating on a single market and asset class, OneAsset avoids diluting its underwriting capabilities through cross-regional, cross-category expansion, aiming to build a more stable pipeline of projects and operator networks.
OneAsset's approach also links asset selection and distribution as interrelated phases. Different commercial properties have different lease structures, cash flow characteristics, and operational risks, making them suitable for different types of investors. Under this logic, the first question for tokenization is not "which assets can be tokenized technically," but "which assets have economic models clear enough to identify real demand and possess credible distribution pathways."
Reshaping the Commercial Real Estate Investment Chain: From Asset Selection to Compliant Transfer
In Sonia's view, current participants in the real estate RWA market can be broadly categorized into three types based on their business models.
The first category is retail-focused fragmentation platforms, represented by platforms like Lofty, which split single-family homes or small rental properties into low-priced digital shares. In Sonia's opinion, while this model increases accessibility to real estate investment, having a large number of investors co-owning a single property can also increase governance and operational coordination complexity. Investment returns remain subject to factors like tenants, maintenance, and the residential market.
The second category is white-label technology providers, such as Brickken. Brickken offers SaaS, white-label, and API-based tokenization infrastructure, covering legal structure design, asset issuance, compliance, investor management, governance, and revenue distribution across the asset lifecycle.
Sonia believes the core distinction between OneAsset and such platforms lies not in whether blockchain or smart contracts are used, but in whether OneAsset directly participates in the screening, underwriting, and ongoing management of the underlying assets. Positioned as an asset originator, OneAsset aims to connect the asset side with the investment side using institutional-grade infrastructure, rather than being a mere technology service provider.
The third category comprises comprehensive RWA infrastructure providers like Mavryk. Beyond building a dedicated Layer 1 for RWA scenarios, Mavryk also offers market infrastructure covering primary and secondary markets through Equiteez, and is involved in acquiring, digitizing, and distributing on-chain assets through REIT funds. This means its model extends to both underlying blockchain infrastructure and asset origination/market distribution.
OneAsset, on the other hand, does not develop its own underlying blockchain. It initially plans to deploy on Base, with future compatibility for more networks based on asset, regulatory, and market needs. Sonia believes that instead of investing resources in a base layer protocol, the company prefers to focus more on asset quality, legal structure design, and regulatory adaptation.
On the investor side, OneAsset intends to adopt an institution-led model initially, primarily targeting professional asset allocators like family offices, fund-of-funds, and corporate treasury departments.
Different types of investors have different needs. Institutional allocators may prioritize asset safety and risk-adjusted returns, while digital-native and cross-border investors might place more value on accessibility, transferability, and capital efficiency. OneAsset's approach is to match each asset with investors whose investment objectives align with the asset's economic characteristics.
According to OneAsset's plan, before subscribing, investors can view key information on the platform, such as independent Net Asset Value (NAV) valuations, tenant leases, and operational costs for specific assets. Investors can directly subscribe to the corresponding vault, rather than buying into a blind-pool product containing multiple assets. After subscribing to a tokenized asset, investors can choose to hold long-term or, subject to identity, jurisdiction, and transfer rules—and provided there is a buyer—transfer part of their holdings without re-signing the entire set of physical real estate transaction documents.
The Core of Real Estate On-Chaining is Enforceable Legal Rights
As business models are not yet mature, real estate tokenization is often oversimplified as "putting buildings on-chain." This simplistic description can obscure and blur the distinction between tokens and genuine property rights.
"Vault tokens are not equivalent to direct legal title to the building itself, and OneAsset would never describe them as such," OneAsset states. Precisely defining the rights represented by the instrument is fundamental to gaining recognition from institutional counterparties.
In OneAsset's design, when an investor acquires an asset vault token, they explicitly hold a digital-native instrument representing their economic interest in a specific, independent commercial property.
The enforceable claim resides in the underlying legal structure, held via a dedicated, bankruptcy-remote Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV) corresponding one-to-one with the specific property. The exact rights an investor enjoys are determined by the legal documents behind the vault and the SPV, not by the token alone.
The token's true function is to record and transfer these interests. This structure aims to ensure the token does not become disconnected from the legal claim: the holder of the vault token is the recognized economic rights holder under the legal documents.
"Smart contracts can efficiently execute pre-defined rules, but they cannot resolve local property rights, tax liabilities, or bankruptcy proceedings," Sonia explains. If institutional investors and automated systems are to hold digital assets with confidence, the off-chain structure must be robust enough.
This is why OneAsset emphasizes bankruptcy remoteness. A properly designed SPV aims to isolate each property from other properties and from OneAsset's own corporate operations, ensuring investors' related rights remain independent even if the platform encounters issues. For institutional investors, this is essentially a counterparty risk issue: whether legal recourse can survive independently of the platform itself.
For real estate RWAs, while smart contract audits are important, investors need greater assurance: who owns the property, who collects rent, how to replace an underperforming operator, and to whom investors can assert their rights if the platform fails. Without these arrangements, a token is merely a digital record without an anchor.
Driving Real Estate RWA Scale with "Regulation-by-Design"
Real estate is inherently local. The location of the property, SPV registration, investor domicile, and token trading venue may each fall under different regulatory regimes, making cross-border issuance and transfer far more complex than typical crypto assets.
"When selecting our first market, we didn't simply chase market exposure in any region. We conducted a planned, structural screening. Dubai's Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority (VARA) provided precisely this clarity, enabling us to pursue an uncompromising 'regulation-by-design' path."
OneAsset chose Dubai as its first market, partly because the jurisdiction has established a dedicated regulatory framework for virtual assets. The company is currently progressing with applications under VARA and using the pre-approval window to refine its legal obligations and technical systems.
Alongside regulatory efforts, OneAsset has also obtained ISO/IEC 27001:2022 Information Security Management System certification. The certification covers its cloud-hosted applications, backend infrastructure, and smart contracts used for on-chain operations. For investors, this means sensitive information and digital investment systems are managed under a formally assessed information security framework, not reliant on ad-hoc or fragmented internal controls.
As the platform expands into more jurisdictions, this core architecture will handle compliance requirements through three programmable layers:
• First, a licensed, identity-aware token architecture. Enforcing ownership controls, investor qualification verification, and cross-border transfer rules directly at the token layer, so compliance travels with the asset itself, independent of the specific trading venue. This allows the same core architecture to adapt to different jurisdictions the platform enters.
• Second, an automated qualification review system. Embedding KYC/AML verification, regional investor classification, and applicable investor qualification frameworks directly into the user onboarding process.
• Third, unified disclosure standards. Replicating an independent, vault-level asset reporting engine globally to meet disclosure requirements of different international regulators.
Beyond these compliance measures, issues exposed by some early real estate tokenization projects highlight that tokenization is not a one-time issuance event but involves a full lifecycle. After tokenization, properties continue to generate real-world issues like maintenance, insurance, taxes, and vacancy changes. OneAsset plans to build infrastructure covering the entire lifecycle of tokenized real estate, focusing on ongoing operations, information reporting, and asset management. The platform aims to aggregate and standardize complex off-chain real estate metrics through rigorous governance controls.
"OneAsset plans to introduce independent NAV valuations for each asset vault. Key data—from tenant covenants and lease terms to building maintenance costs, local taxes, and cash flow schedules—will be system-verified and presented transparently."
Furthermore, OneAsset views this continuous reporting capability as integral to its infrastructure, not an add-on service post-issuance. The platform also intends to convert real estate valuations, leases, and cash flow data into machine-readable formats, enabling continuous assessment of asset performance.
Fragmentation Does Not Equal Liquidity; Liquidity Stems from the Asset Itself
Over the past two years, the process of bringing real-world assets on-chain has accelerated significantly. According to industry data platform RWA.xyz, as of August 26, 2026, the "Distributed Asset Value" of on-chain tokenized RWAs was approximately $38.30 billion; at the same time, the "Represented Asset Value" was about $353.11 billion—roughly 9 times larger. This gap itself illustrates the distance between "announced tokenization" and "already possessing tradability."
However, when calculating market size, the industry often conflates "Represented Asset Value"—assets announced or committed for tokenization but not yet freely transferable—with assets that are genuinely on-chain and tradable. This is particularly common in real estate: a building worth hundreds of millions being included in a cooperation agreement does not equate to the existence of an equivalent volume of tradable tokens and liquidity in the market.
OneAsset believes "fragmentation does not equal liquidity." Slicing a property lacking buyer demand into millions of pieces does not automatically create a market; it merely fragments the existing liquidity problem.
True liquidity originates first from the asset itself. Only when a property has a good location, stable tenants, verifiable cash flows, and reasonable valuation will investors be inclined to buy consistently. Secondly, the market must have a sufficient number of eligible buyers. Even if technology permits 24/7 transferability, if there are no counterparties on the order book, investors cannot exit.
Therefore, liquidity cannot be designed in isolation from the distribution system. A secondary market requires far more than just technical transferability. It needs a pool of qualified buyers of different types, potentially from different markets, who have genuine reasons to hold the underlying asset. As the market develops, more use cases—including portfolio allocation, corporate treasury management, and compliant lending—could further expand asset demand beyond secondary resale.
OneAsset also distinguishes between settlement efficiency and liquidity. T+0 atomic settlement and unified account systems can improve the efficiency of completed trades and capital reallocation, but they themselves cannot create buyers or solve price discovery. The latter two remain market problems, not issues smart contracts can directly resolve.
From RWA to AiFi: When Real Estate Becomes "Machine-Readable"
Recently, Coinbase brought broader industry attention to this direction through the concept of "on-chain agentic finance," or AiFi. In July this year, Coinbase founder and CEO Brian Armstrong described the Base network, USDC, and the x402 protocol on social media as core infrastructure enabling AI agents to autonomously complete machine-to-machine payments. This statement was made shortly before Coinbase's Q2 earnings release. It should be noted that Coinbase's current definition of AiFi primarily focuses on payment and commercial settlement scenarios between agents, not asset allocation itself.
OneAsset discusses the further extension of this trend into the investment asset allocation domain. At the Hack Seasons Cannes conference in April this year, OneAsset's Chief Investment Officer, Arthur Katz, suggested that as capital allocation becomes increasingly driven by AI, the transparency and programmability of on-chain assets could grow in importance within the institutional financial system.
For Sonia, the more pertinent question is: what assets will these AI agents allocate capital to in the future? An AI-driven financial system cannot only have programmable money; it equally needs programmable investment assets.
If a system cannot determine what a real estate token legally represents, who is eligible to hold it, how the property is valued, how much income the asset generates, what restrictions apply, and whether a transaction can settle, then that real estate token cannot be considered truly "machine-readable" in a meaningful sense.
This is the significance of OneAsset's work in standardizing valuation, lease, cash flow, compliance, and ownership data. The most immediate application is improving information disclosure and investment infrastructure. In the longer term, tokenized real estate assets may achieve a sufficiently high degree of structuring, enabling software to screen, verify, and allocate these assets much like a human portfolio manager. In this sense, the starting point for AiFi is not AI itself, but first having a set of financial assets that machines can understand.
Thus, real estate tokenization is shifting from emphasizing issuance speed and low barriers to re-examining asset quality, legal structure, and long-term operations. The industry needs a clear realization: blockchain can shorten settlement times, reduce some transfer costs, and make real estate interests easier to split and program, but it cannot replace underwriting, property management, and legal enforcement.
OneAsset is attempting to address these issues through single-asset vaults, bankruptcy-remote SPVs, independent valuations, and continuous data disclosure. However, much of the design remains in testing and planning stages. Its model still needs validation through real asset launches, regulatory approvals, and secondary market operations.
After real estate goes on-chain, the truly difficult work is just beginning.
