Tokenizing real-world assets is the future—there’s more to it

Trading tokenized assets means far more than just gambling on the price of NFT collections. It means opening up and speeding up the digital economy for everything. It could be about investing in shares of real estate developments, government megaprojects, vehicles, or companies. Nothing is too large or too small. Digital tokenization of real-world assets (RWAs) means no investment is too large or small. This opens up markets for almost anything, with 24/7 trading, potentially available to anyone in the world.

It’s already happening in places like Dubai, and it’s coming soon to an economy near you. But to get the whole picture, you need to think beyond just tokens standing in for physical property. Intangible but important things can be tokenized too: intellectual property or settlement processes. In this video from the London Blockchain Conference 2025, we look at a few of the more interesting use cases.

Tokenizing the settlement process

Tokenovate is a company that has examined several opportunities in this field, and CEO Richard Baker says the right technological and political environments are now more favorable than ever. He and CTO Steve Haigh explain the concept of “Tokenized Settlement,” where the token doesn’t represent a specific asset, but rather the legal processes for settling payments.

The team has developed the “Novat Protocol,” which comes from the legal concept of “novation”—or, settling a trade between two counterparties. This has traditionally been done through clearing houses, but by tokenizing the process, it moves a lot faster. Faster, as in near-instant or “T-zero,” instead of taking whole days.

“I’m novating the trade to a third party that is sharing the liability of that trade, and the risk in that trade,” he says. “I wanted to modernize that workflow.”

Tokenovate calls this “the use case of collateral mobility.” You speed up the settlement process, freeing up the money for use elsewhere rather than locking it up for days at a time. And “days at a time” is costly in a high-speed digital economy.

Tokenizing (and trading) IP in the music industry

Using very similar tokenization techniques, it’s possible to tokenize other assets that may not be an obvious choice for everyone. The video also features Elas CEO Brendan Lee discussing intellectual property in the music industry.

A talented musician could tokenize shares of a work they’ve created and sell them to fans. Fans are therefore “investing” in the work and will earn income if it becomes widely used.

This process combines two elements: SonicAI and Origin Exchange. SonicAI features an artificial intelligence with a “golden ear,” meaning it can identify any piece of music and its origin. Elas is building a system that takes those pieces of music, watermarks them, and embeds the provenance in a blockchain smart contract. The artist fractionalizes and tokenizes the ownership rights.

Origin Exchange is the trading platform where these shares can be traded. The idea is for this exchange to be open to anyone, with trading of IP shares based on their market value.

As you can see in the video, RWA tokenization opens up many opportunities, expands trading markets to more capital, and can involve more people. Some, like Tokenovate’s process, are designed to live within the boundaries of the financial settlements industry. Others, like Origin Exchange, aim to bring trading access to a larger pool of investors. But the technology and the bottom line are very similar. Digitize, speed everything up, and keep legally secure records of who owns what. Fundamentally, that’s what tokenization is all about, and a scalable blockchain is the foundation that keeps everything running smoothly.

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