Dubai-Based Crypto Firm’s New Product to Allow Real-World Assets to Be Tokenized

A crypto company has launched a new product that focuses on the tokenization of real-world assets, such as property, art and commodities — a venture it believes will transform the way the world invests, trades and transfers value.

DGTO is the latest offering by Darico, and the firm says its service provides business owners and developers with “all the tools needed to tokenize assets into security tokens,” including legal and technical expertise as well as sales and marketing strategies. The parent company claims that its tokenization platform says it is in contact with regulators in different jurisdictions to ensure that its platform is legally compliant.

With a view to kickstarting the new product and “establishing itself as a major player in the tokenized real estate market,” Darico says it has acquired 30 apartments and 15 villas with a combined value of $20 million — all with a view to tokenization. The company says it is currently in negotiations with some of the biggest players in the UAE real estate market, as well as “some significant infrastructure projects.”

Through DGTO, executives hope to increase the liquidity seen in the global real estate market. According to research by the British property firm Savills, the world’s real estate was worth a combined total of $280 trillion in 2017 — an increase of 6.2 percent on the year before. Residential properties accounted for most of this record-breaking amount, with commercial and agricultural real estate comprising the rest.

DGTO is going to offer a web-based platform that would enable users to participate in security token offerings for the real-world assets being migrated to blockchain. Darico believes this opens up the possibility for crypto enthusiasts to own a fraction of an apartment — giving them options only available to high net worth individuals beforehand.

A tokenized world

Darico, which launched in 2016, says DGTO will join its ecosystem of five products successfully being developed. The tokenization platform is going to have strong ties with its DAREX exchange, enabling the new security tokens created by businesses to be traded “effortlessly” on a secondary market.

As Cointelegraph reported back in November 2018, the digital asset exchange boasts a hybrid model which allows users to trade utilities and securities, with token holders receiving a share of the revenue generated by these transactions.

Other products within the ecosystem include the GNIUS wallet, which was designed to address “pain points” seen in some of the industry’s most-used products. As well as being simple to understand and easy to manage, Darico says that the wallet can support Bitcoin, Ethereum, and more than 2,000 ERC-20, ERC-771 and ERC-223 assets.

In 2019, Darico is also planning to launch DEPAY — a debit card intended to “bring together the digital and physical world” by enabling consumers to access and spend their cryptocurrencies wherever they like and whenever they please. The company says “quick and simple transactions” would also be facilitated through a feature allowing card holders to switch to fiat currency as required.

New partnerships formed

Darico’s plan to become a market leader in the tokenization of real estate comes after it announced a partnership with RDK Commercial Investment — a company described as “one of the United Arab Emirates’ premier private property” providers. Through the collaboration, both companies want to explore the prospect of offering crypto mortgages, where monthly payments can be made using virtual currencies. It is also hoped that the partnership would further DGTO’s vision of enabling the public to own fractions of an apartment — including luxury real estate in Dubai.

In a blog post, Darico explained why it wants to offer the world previously unexplored alternatives for acquiring property, writing: “Nowadays, the real estate sector is considered difficult to access and owning a real estate is not affordable by all people. There are assets that are less liquid than others and transaction costs for the entire asset make it difficult for them to be traded or invested in.”