One of my predictions for this year was that we would see the mainstream adoption of tokenized real-world assets. More specifically, I said that we'd see some noteworthy office building or apartment building get tokenized on the Ethereum blockchain.
Maybe. I'm not sure that we'll see a singular event this year or that we'll be able to call it "mainstream" just yet. According to this recent article by Chris Lehman, co-founder of a tokenized REIT called Groma, it's still early days.
Real estate is the world's largest asset class, with an estimated global value of around $400 trillion. But only about $500 million of it has been tokenized, which is a relatively small amount, though it's not nothing. So, what is it going to take for us to say it's "mainstream"?
Some of the obvious benefits of tokenization are that it makes transactions cheap and efficient, and it allows for composability, meaning the various smart contracts on a blockchain can then be combined and interconnected with other protocols and applications to unlock additional use cases.
Lehman gives the specific example of being able to split yield and appreciation for tokenized real estate. My mind always goes to codifying the financial terms of something like a Limited Partnership Agreement such that all of the cash flows get automatically distributed as per the agreed-upon deal.
Importantly, though, and this is mentioned in the article, the fractionalization of real assets is unlikely to be the killer feature of tokenization. Notwithstanding that it does bring some additional benefits, we've already figured out how to "democratize" the ownership of large and expensive real estate assets through REITs and other vehicles.
Instead, Lehman argues that "improving real estate's utility as collateral is likely to be the most significant improvement tokenization can offer."
I don't have a strong opinion on what will serve as the primary adoption catalyst, but I have little doubt in my mind that this is where the ownership of real estate (and other assets) is heading. If any of you are working in this space, and especially if you're based in Toronto or elsewhere in Canada, I'd love to connect with you for a coffee.
Prediction markets have become a big deal, presumably because a lot of people like betting. But functionally and economically, prediction markets are also supposed to be about information discovery. If you get enough people researching, analyzing, and thinking about something, eventually the "wisdom of the crowds" should prevail and something resembling the truth should, in theory, emerge. The stereotypical use for a prediction market (also referred to as an event market) is a binary bet. Will this happen? Yes or no.
But now, you can also bet on real estate prices:
Parcl, the real-time housing data and onchain real estate platform, and Polymarket, the world’s largest prediction market, today announced a partnership to bring Parcl’s daily housing price indices to a new suite of real estate prediction markets on Polymarket.
The partnership will introduce housing-focused markets that settle against Parcl’s published price indices, giving traders and analysts an objective, data-driven reference point for forecasting where home prices are headed. Polymarket will list and operate the markets; Parcl will provide independent index data and settlement reference values designed for transparent verification.
Housing is the largest asset class in the world, but it’s still hard to express a clean view on price direction without taking on property-level complexity, leverage, or long timelines. By combining Parcl’s daily indices with Polymarket’s event-market structure, the partnership offers a simpler way to trade housing outcomes, with clear settlement rules and public, auditable resolution data.
Here's a specific example: What will the median home value in Miami be on February 1?
The first time I ever used dial-up internet was sometime in the 1990s. Some of you will remember that a company called CompuServe used to mail out floppy disks with "10 free hours." And I still remember the feeling of amazement the first time I tried it. Suddenly, I could chat with people from around the world. Remember a/s/l? It was so enthralling that those 10 free hours certainly didn't last very long.
Fast forward to more recent times, and I got that exact same feeling of amazement when I started diving into crypto. The first time I created a wallet, logged into to a service (using only the wallet), and then transferred funds around, I thought to myself, "Wow, this is a fundamental shift in how the world works." A lightbulb went off. And I still feel this way about crypto, which is why I remain long ETH.
But now I'm also excited about AI (along with the rest of the world). With every new model release, it gets that much more impressive. Last week I wrote about Gemini 3 and, since then, I decided to cancel my ChatGPT subscription and move all my activity over to it. I'm sure that a better model will get released before we know it, but for right now I'm having a lot of fun creating just about everything.
Here's a cartoon isometric of Toronto that I prompted to include "landmarks" and the day's weather.
One of my predictions for this year was that we would see the mainstream adoption of tokenized real-world assets. More specifically, I said that we'd see some noteworthy office building or apartment building get tokenized on the Ethereum blockchain.
Maybe. I'm not sure that we'll see a singular event this year or that we'll be able to call it "mainstream" just yet. According to this recent article by Chris Lehman, co-founder of a tokenized REIT called Groma, it's still early days.
Real estate is the world's largest asset class, with an estimated global value of around $400 trillion. But only about $500 million of it has been tokenized, which is a relatively small amount, though it's not nothing. So, what is it going to take for us to say it's "mainstream"?
Some of the obvious benefits of tokenization are that it makes transactions cheap and efficient, and it allows for composability, meaning the various smart contracts on a blockchain can then be combined and interconnected with other protocols and applications to unlock additional use cases.
Lehman gives the specific example of being able to split yield and appreciation for tokenized real estate. My mind always goes to codifying the financial terms of something like a Limited Partnership Agreement such that all of the cash flows get automatically distributed as per the agreed-upon deal.
Importantly, though, and this is mentioned in the article, the fractionalization of real assets is unlikely to be the killer feature of tokenization. Notwithstanding that it does bring some additional benefits, we've already figured out how to "democratize" the ownership of large and expensive real estate assets through REITs and other vehicles.
Instead, Lehman argues that "improving real estate's utility as collateral is likely to be the most significant improvement tokenization can offer."
I don't have a strong opinion on what will serve as the primary adoption catalyst, but I have little doubt in my mind that this is where the ownership of real estate (and other assets) is heading. If any of you are working in this space, and especially if you're based in Toronto or elsewhere in Canada, I'd love to connect with you for a coffee.
Prediction markets have become a big deal, presumably because a lot of people like betting. But functionally and economically, prediction markets are also supposed to be about information discovery. If you get enough people researching, analyzing, and thinking about something, eventually the "wisdom of the crowds" should prevail and something resembling the truth should, in theory, emerge. The stereotypical use for a prediction market (also referred to as an event market) is a binary bet. Will this happen? Yes or no.
But now, you can also bet on real estate prices:
Parcl, the real-time housing data and onchain real estate platform, and Polymarket, the world’s largest prediction market, today announced a partnership to bring Parcl’s daily housing price indices to a new suite of real estate prediction markets on Polymarket.
The partnership will introduce housing-focused markets that settle against Parcl’s published price indices, giving traders and analysts an objective, data-driven reference point for forecasting where home prices are headed. Polymarket will list and operate the markets; Parcl will provide independent index data and settlement reference values designed for transparent verification.
Housing is the largest asset class in the world, but it’s still hard to express a clean view on price direction without taking on property-level complexity, leverage, or long timelines. By combining Parcl’s daily indices with Polymarket’s event-market structure, the partnership offers a simpler way to trade housing outcomes, with clear settlement rules and public, auditable resolution data.
Here's a specific example: What will the median home value in Miami be on February 1?
The first time I ever used dial-up internet was sometime in the 1990s. Some of you will remember that a company called CompuServe used to mail out floppy disks with "10 free hours." And I still remember the feeling of amazement the first time I tried it. Suddenly, I could chat with people from around the world. Remember a/s/l? It was so enthralling that those 10 free hours certainly didn't last very long.
Fast forward to more recent times, and I got that exact same feeling of amazement when I started diving into crypto. The first time I created a wallet, logged into to a service (using only the wallet), and then transferred funds around, I thought to myself, "Wow, this is a fundamental shift in how the world works." A lightbulb went off. And I still feel this way about crypto, which is why I remain long ETH.
But now I'm also excited about AI (along with the rest of the world). With every new model release, it gets that much more impressive. Last week I wrote about Gemini 3 and, since then, I decided to cancel my ChatGPT subscription and move all my activity over to it. I'm sure that a better model will get released before we know it, but for right now I'm having a lot of fun creating just about everything.
Here's a cartoon isometric of Toronto that I prompted to include "landmarks" and the day's weather.
Right now, the market seems to believe it will be greater than $1.1 million. This is fascinating. Among many other things, it gives us a clear and real-time sense of market sentiment. But as Matt Levine wrote in Money Stuff, it also gives homeowners the ability to hedge and diversify their housing market risk. If you live in a cold, high-tax place and you're super envious of everyone moving to Miami, you could, of course, just sell your house and move there too. But if you don't want to do that and you still want to participate in its growth, now you can just bet on its home prices using this derivatives market.
Cover photo by Cody Board on Unsplash
Here's a photo of a woman standing in the middle of a street in Tokyo wearing a trench coat and holding an umbrella. My prompt also asked it to make it look like a "grainy digital photo."
And here's a knolling shot (new word I just learned) featuring the gear of a global citizen (or globizen if you will). I prompted each of the objects, down to the white panel on the Blue Jays hat.
It's not perfect. Text remains an issue. If you look closely at the front of the passports or the text on the Fujifilm camera, you'll see that it's AI. But it's only a matter of time before this goes away. These kinds of images used to require a lot of time and effort. Now I can create them with one hand on my phone while I'm eating a bowl of cereal and having a morning coffee. There's zero marginal cost.
Thank goodness I've got more than 10 hours of usage.
Right now, the market seems to believe it will be greater than $1.1 million. This is fascinating. Among many other things, it gives us a clear and real-time sense of market sentiment. But as Matt Levine wrote in Money Stuff, it also gives homeowners the ability to hedge and diversify their housing market risk. If you live in a cold, high-tax place and you're super envious of everyone moving to Miami, you could, of course, just sell your house and move there too. But if you don't want to do that and you still want to participate in its growth, now you can just bet on its home prices using this derivatives market.
Cover photo by Cody Board on Unsplash
Here's a photo of a woman standing in the middle of a street in Tokyo wearing a trench coat and holding an umbrella. My prompt also asked it to make it look like a "grainy digital photo."
And here's a knolling shot (new word I just learned) featuring the gear of a global citizen (or globizen if you will). I prompted each of the objects, down to the white panel on the Blue Jays hat.
It's not perfect. Text remains an issue. If you look closely at the front of the passports or the text on the Fujifilm camera, you'll see that it's AI. But it's only a matter of time before this goes away. These kinds of images used to require a lot of time and effort. Now I can create them with one hand on my phone while I'm eating a bowl of cereal and having a morning coffee. There's zero marginal cost.
Thank goodness I've got more than 10 hours of usage.
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