Securities dealer Ocree Capital has launched a regulated real estate platform in Canada, giving investors access to tokenized shares of commercial property on the Polymesh blockchain.
The new Ocree platform debuted on March 24 with a $51.9 million commercial real estate listing in Winnipeg, Manitoba. The featured property is a Class “A” multi-residential development with 156 units.
Ocree said $4 million of equity is being offered to investors via fractional shares.
“Investors are not providing debt; they are participating in the equity of the asset,” Ocree CEO Ted Davis told Cointelegraph. “The investors purchase an interest in a limited partnership that invests in the underlying property.”
The property was tokenized entirely on Polymesh, a purpose-built blockchain for real-world assets (RWAs). As Cointelegraph reported, Polymesh was selected to tokenize a $2.5 million church in Colorado last summer.
“By building on Polymesh’s institutional-grade public permissioned blockchain, we’ve created a platform that benefits both property owners seeking liquidity and investors looking for access to premium real estate opportunities,” Davis said.
Ocree is an exempt market dealer (EMD) registered with the Ontario Securities Commission (OSC) and has licenses in all Canadian provinces and territories, except Quebec. The EMD status allows Ocree to distribute properties to accredited investors and other qualified individuals.
“The registration process took close to one year to complete, with multiple conversations with the OSC both before and during the registration process,” said Davis.
Tokenization takes off
Tokenization, or the process of representing real-world assets on a blockchain, has taken the traditional finance industry by storm in recent years.
Major financial institutions such as JPMorgan Chase, UBS, Citibank, HSBC and BlackRock have signaled their intent to offer tokenized products and services. In Canada, RWA players like Atlas One, Taurus and Polymath have also emerged with institutional-grade RWA platforms on offer.
There’s a reason why big banks are pivoting to tokenization. In addition to boosting liquidity and making it easier to connect buyers and sellers, RWAs solve many bottlenecks in the traditional finance industry, according to Matthew Burgoyne, a partner at Canadian business law firm Osler. He wrote:
“Financial transactions, especially those that cross borders, are often delayed as a result of the large number of intermediaries that are required, particularly in execution and settlement. However, the distributed and transparent nature of token-underpinned ledgers facilitates near-instant settlement at a reduced cost compared to traditional finance.”
For these reasons, tokenized securities could become a multitrillion-dollar market by 2030, according to industry research.
Excluding stablecoins, the total value of RWAs onchain has reached $31.3 billion, according to RWA.xyz. This represents an increase of 94% over the past 30 days.