At an early stage, the tokenisation of real-world assets other than art has happened in property.
In March 2019, Berlin-based Brickblock tokenised a real estate vehicle containing a €2 m property in Wiesbaden, western Germany. This was believed to be the first such transaction in Europe in which property shares were registered as digital token on the blockchain.
An estimated 41 companies in 17 countries, including the US, Germany and Switzerland, have been trialling tokenisation of property, according to a joint study by the Hamburg Commercial Bank and the Frankfurt School Blockchain Center think-tank, published in September. The report stated that the market was still in its infancy and that it was a rough estimate due to a lack of transparency in the market and suggested that tokenising and fractionalising large buildings into small tradable units could make it more accessible to investors.
It is believed that tokenisation can allow retail investors with as little as €1 or $1 to participate in a rise in house prices without being a property owner.
A company called RealT offers investors the chance to buy into the country's property market through fractional tokenized ownership using a blockchain. The ownership of properties in cities such as Detroit is recorded by digital token on the Ethereum blockchain.
There are also tokens issued against other real assets, such as high-end whisky collections and limited-edition gins.
The asset that has been tokenised is gold. Paxos, a US-regulated digital asset company that is responsible for digital assets, has issued PAX Gold, a digital asset where one token represents a fine troy ounce of a London Good Delivery gold bar, which is stored in secure vaults in London.
The investors in PAX Gold, built on the Ethereum blockchain, own the underlying gold without having to worry about storing the precious metal themselves. The holders of PAX Gold can find the serial number and purity of each gold bar on their website, according to Paxos.