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A Phil Hall Op-Ed: The other day, I had a conversation with Bart de Brujin, the co-founder of EstateX, a new real estate platform tokenization platform. EstateX promotes itself as a “revolution in the real estate industry” – while I can’t vouch for a revolution in the making, it appears this platform and other like it is on the cutting edge of real estate investing.

“Assets are tokenized on the Ethereum blockchain,” de Brujin said about how his platform worked. “The divided ownership is stored into a smart contract via regulated registrar that we work with. The shares of that vehicle are then turned into tokens and then distributed and sold to potential investors.”

EstateX enables investors to invest as little as $100 into fractional property shares, which opens them to a world of investment opportunities – and it provides property owners with a global audience to attract.

“If you’re a property owner in, let’s say, Japan, you are able to tokenize it and offer it to US investors or European investors,” de Brujin continued. “And this can be done with any type of asset. This can be done with land. This can be done with existing commercial buildings or with residential real estate. In principle, it can all be done.”

Lately, it seems like a week cannot go by without some news from the US or overseas regarding cryptocurrency and blockchain in real estate. Yesterday, an entity in the British Virgin Islands called RentFi, which promotes itself as the “first Real Estate Investment Trust on blockchain,” announced it will launch its $RENT token on Feb. 5 that will enable “global investors access to rental income,” with the promising of helping “individuals benefit from rental yields without the traditional complexities of property ownership.”

Elsewhere in the world, Klickl, a UAE-based Web3 financial platform, today announced a collaboration with IMKAN Properties, a UAE real estate developer, to facilitate property purchases through cryptocurrency. And last week, the Tokyo-headquartered real estate firm Open House Group Co. Ltd. is now accepting cryptocurrency payments from global customers looking to purchase Japanese real estate.

And it’s not just the property owners and sellers taking advantage of this new way of doing business. Last month, the Celebration, Florida-headquartered La Rosa Holdings Corp. announced it will offer Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies as a payment option for its network of agents. CEO Joe La Rosa stated that “cryptocurrency payments offer faster, more secure transactions with lower fees while providing the potential for income growth through the value appreciation of digital assets.”

While the real estate industry moves ahead with cryptocurrency and blockchain solutions, the US federal government needs to play catch-up – and fast. We wasted four years with a Biden administration that feared and loathed cryptocurrency and made no effort to create a feasible regulatory framework to accommodate this growing sector. Gary Gensler, in his tenure as Biden’s commissioner of the US Securities and Exchange Commission, was never comfortable with this sector and did everything possible to marginalize it.

Now, of course, we have a self-proclaimed “crypto president” who even has his own meme coin – what a difference three weeks makes! President Trump signed an executive order creating a working group to develop a federal regulatory framework for digital assets, and hopefully they will complete their assignment ASAP.

It is great for the cryptocurrency and blockchain worlds to have allies in the White House. Cryptocurrency and blockchain represent the new frontier in real estate sales and investing – something that Gensler compared to the “Wild West.” Well, the Wild West was tamed and reimagined into an orderly and successful environment, and this corner of the digital world is awaiting the same approach to law and order.

EstateX’s de Brujin predicted that “tokenization is going to kick off this year” as more companies enter the space and more major players become involved. I share de Brujin’s forecast, and I am eager to see its impact on the real estate industry. The Trump team needs to get started on making this exciting new opportunity a safely regulated environment that will encourage innovation and growth for the years ahead.

Phil Hall is editor of Weekly Real Estate News. He can be reached at [email protected].