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Ghassan Farajallah's avatar

woooow

Top Tick Research's avatar

One note is that $BTGO was just "tokenized" in a wrapper form - not native. When you get real native issuance alongside IPOs that's the real game-changer imo. I'm looking for tokenized shares THAT carry the same CUSIP, dividends, voting rights, and governance as traditional ones. The EXACT same assets. Not wrapped securities like you buy on Ondo, which rely on custodians or centralized infrastructure to hold the underlying asset.

I think Ondo's model is just a bridge to native which is done by firms like Securitize. Big institutional money won't come on-chain for wrappers... which is why the NYSE is developing a native model imo.

Mark Fidelman's avatar

INteresting, do you invest in tokenized (non-wrapped) real estate?

Top Tick Research's avatar

I do not, and I'm more focused on equities right now (specifically Securitize, Inc. which is going public thru $CEPT SPAC which I am long). But that’s the right question to ask because it exposes the current gap in the market.

My concern is that in a "wrapper" model (like Ondo or RealT), the blockchain is a secondary ledger that mirrors a primary, paper-based ledger held by an LLC or a custodian. If the blockchain breaks or the tokens are lost, the legal owner is still technically that central entity, and you're just holding a digital receipt.

To be consistent with my earlier point: most "tokenized real estate" today is still a wrapper, which I assume is what you are suggesting. Most platforms typically put a property into an LLC and then tokenize the shares of that LLC. It’s a great bridge for retail, but it’s still an indirect claim on the title.

For me (or more importantly big institutions) to "invest" in the way I described, I am looking for:

Native Legal Binding: Where the token is the legal manifestation of the security, not just a digital receipt for an off-chain LLC share.

Institutional Rails: I lean toward the Securitize model with KKR or BlackRock. While those are funds rather than individual buildings, they use a Digital Transfer Agent model where the blockchain serves as the official "Source of Truth" for the cap table. In this case, there is no off-chain master file that overrides the chain.

Direct Deed Integration: The "holy grail" is when the county recorder's office recognizes the token transfer as a deed transfer. We aren't there yet in the US, but until then, I prefer models where the smart contract handles the CUSIP-level reporting (or the Parcel ID equivalent in RE) and automated tax distributions natively."

What do you think? Do think wrappers work long-term?

Mark Fidelman's avatar

Do wrappers work long-term? My take

Short answer: No. They are a temporary prosthetic.

Longer answer, no fluff:

Wrappers exist because:

Regulators are cautious

Infrastructure is legacy

Retail needed an on-ramp

But wrappers have fatal flaws at scale:

Counterparty risk never goes away

Blockchain cannot be the source of truth

Institutions hate dual-ledger systems

You can’t net settle, rehypothecate, or integrate deeply

Big money does not move trillions into receipts.

Wrappers will:

*Survive in retail

*Survive for yield products

*Survive as bridges

*But they will not be the end state.

*The end state looks like:

Native issuance

On-chain cap tables

Transfer agents as protocol operators

One ledger, not two

For real estate, the holy grail Top Tick mentions is real:

Parcel ID mapped to a token

County recorder recognizes on-chain transfer

Title updates automatically

We’re early. But that’s the direction.

Bottom line

Your are directionally right. Wrappers are a bridge, not a destination.

Native issuance wins because:

*It collapses legal and technical truth into one system

*It removes reconciliation risk

*It scales to institutional size

*If tokenization doesn’t replace the system of record, it doesn’t matter.