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Tokenisation in the Real World

The idea of tokenisation has gone beyond cryptocurrencies and entered the mainstream business world. Essentially, tokenisation involves representing real-world assets, such as companies, commodities, or property, as digital tokens on a blockchain. This opens up new opportunities to unlock previously illiquid value, expand investment access, and streamline complex transactions.

Although blockchain technology is often associated primarily with Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies, its potential applications are much broader. Blockchain provides an immutable recording of transactions, transparency, and security. These qualities make it ideal for revolutionising ownership and trade. Tokenisation leverages these advantages of blockchain to solve real-world business inefficiencies as more companies realise the strategic opportunity it presents.

Key Benefits for Businesses

Fractional Ownership Opens Investing

Tokenisation is a process that converts assets such as artwork, real estate, or private equity into smaller tokenised units. This fractional ownership model allows small investors to own a portion of a valuable asset that would otherwise be unavailable to them, making it more affordable. As a result, it also significantly increases the potential pool of buyers for previously highly illiquid assets.

Streamlined Transactions

Embedding transaction rules into smart contracts associated with tokens makes automating administrative tasks possible. This eliminates the need for intermediaries and reduces settlement times to minutes from days, reducing transactional friction and costs.

Enhanced Transparency Builds Trust

Enhanced transparency is essential for building trust in the ownership and transaction of tokenised assets. Blockchain technology's immutable distributed ledger architecture provides this transparency by ensuring that ownership records and transactions cannot be altered or deleted. This is vital for high-value items such as luxury collectables. With blockchain technology, provenance verification is possible, which helps ensure the asset's integrity.

Real-World Tokenisation Use Cases

Fractional Real Estate Investment

Investing in commercial real estate can be a lucrative venture. However, most investors may be out of reach for properties costing tens of millions of dollars. Fortunately, the tokenisation of real estate assets enables these extensive properties to be divided into small, affordable tokenised portions. This not only makes real estate investments accessible but also improves the liquidity of once-illiquid assets. Moreover, this process introduces properties to broader capital markets, enabling more investors to participate.

Authenticating Artwork Ownership

NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, have become popular as they provide a way to verify ownership of unique digital items such as artwork. However, tokenisation can also authenticate physical works of art, solving such problems as proving the artwork's provenance and enabling different parties to own fractions of it.

Streamlining Commodities Trading

Commodities trading has become streamlined with the tokenisation of precious metals and oil. This new system facilitates direct peer-to-peer transactions, eliminating supply chain intermediaries. This results in reduced settlement times, costs, and potential errors. The expectation is these operational efficiencies in commodities trading will expand access and improve operations.

Licensing Intellectual Property

A music record label has the potential to tokenise the royalties of songs in its catalogue. This innovative approach would enable fans to invest in a particular song they wish to support while providing the artist with immediate funds. The possibilities are endless, spanning across patents, trademarks, and all other forms of intellectual property, which can considerably enhance licensing and open up new.

Evolving Tokenisation

Tokenisation is converting assets into digital tokens. Currently, most tokenised asset frameworks still comply with traditional regulatory structures. However, as the technology is still in its early stages and rapidly developing, specific legislation around crypto assets is gradually emerging across different jurisdictions and is expected to continue evolving.

Furthermore, as the technology matures and more proof-of-concepts transition into production environments, companies across various sectors are moving beyond initial experimentation with tokenisation. Auto manufacturers, sports teams, biotech firms, and many other industries are launching pilots and well-defined tokenisation strategies.

Active innovation is also occurring around tokenised ecosystems. Personal data could be tokenised to facilitate users' monetisation of their own data. Music streaming royalties or carbon credits are prime areas that could benefit from the next wave of tokenization-powered transformation.

Beyond the Hype: Unlocking Value

Tokenisation is a technology that is being used by industries to unlock value, streamline processes, and access new capital. It is transitioning from a theoretical concept to a commercial application. Despite some regulatory uncertainties, the technology promises to become more mainstream in business.

The future looks promising for asset tokenisation, which allows fractionalised ownership, increased liquidity, transparency, and simplified transactions. As a result, organisations across sectors have a strategic incentive to explore tokenisation further. They can collaborate with specialised partners like Explora Solutions, which provides advisory services and solutions tailored to tokenise business assets and propel real-world transformation.