Real estate tokenization—once a niche experiment—may soon become a core pillar of how property is financed, owned and traded, according to a Thursday report by Deloitte Center for Financial Services.

The market of tokenized real estate could reach $4 trillion by 2035, growing at a compound annual rate of 27% from the current size of under $300 billion, the firm forecasted.

Tokenization of real-world assets (RWA) is a red-hot sector at the intersection of crypto tech and traditional finance. It consists of creating digital versions of assets like bonds, funds and real estate, that represent ownerships on blockchain rails.
The process offers operational efficiencies, cheaper and faster settlements and broader investor access.

For the real estate sector, tokenization’s appeal lies in its ability to automate and simplify complex financial agreements, the report explained, such as launching a real estate fund on-chain with coded rules handling ownership transfers and capital flows. An example for this is Kin Capital’s $100 million real estate debt fund tokenization platform Chintai with trust-deed-based lending, Deloitte noted.

The report outlines a three-pronged evolution of tokenized property: private real estate funds, securitized loan ownership, and under-construction or undeveloped land projects. Of these, tokenized debt securities are expected to dominate, hitting $2.39 trillion in value by 2035, based on the report’s forecast. Private funds could contribute around $1 trillion, while land development assets may account for some $500 billion.

Despite the advantages, challenges remain, the report noted, especially around regulation, asset custody, cybersecurity and default scenarios.

Read more: Tokenized Funds’ Rapid Growth Comes With Red Flags: Moody’s

El Salvador’s Comisión Nacional de Activos Digitales (CNAD), the agency in charge of regulating digital assets in the Central American nation, is seeking to establish a cross-border regulatory sandbox with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

“We want to create international collaboration,” Juan Carlos Reyes, president of the CNAD, told CoinDesk in an interview. “Our biggest message is that digital assets don’t have any geographical barriers. Collaboration with regulators should not have international barriers either.”

El Salvador is in a unique situation in that it did not boast of strong financial institutions, or even of an existing ecosystem of developers, when President Nayib Bukele made bitcoin legal tender in 2021. That means the CNAD was able to start with a blank slate when it introduced a regulatory framework tailored to crypto.

Almost two years later after Reyes took over the agency, El Salvador’s advanced regulatory framework has incentivized crypto giants such as Tether, Bitfinex and Binance to open shop in the country.

The idea, Reyes said, is for the U.S. SEC to now use El Salvador as a live, real-world case study to evaluate streamlined regulatory approaches for digital assets — in other words, for the SEC to learn from El Salvador’s experience as it revamps its own regulatory framework in a post-Gensler world.

The pilot program proposed by the CNAD involves different scenarios: a U.S.-licensed traditional finance broker obtaining a digital asset license under CNAD regulations, and the development of two small-scale tokenization offerings facilitated by a CNAD-licensed tokenization company. Each scenario would be capped at $10,000.

These initiatives would support some of the objectives laid out by SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce in February, when she wrote that the SEC Crypto Task Force, which she now leads, would take a very different approach towards crypto regulation from here on out.

“CNAD really looked at [Pierce’s document] with a critical eye as to how we can help,” Erica Perkin, owner of The Perkin Law Firm and a member of CNAD’s advisory group, told CoinDesk. “We’re here. There’s data [the SEC] might want to collect. It’s difficult to collect in the U.S. … We’ve built a framework that’s nimble enough to work on the exact issues that the SEC is looking at, and we’re here to help and collect information on how we can best do that.”

The CNAD met with the SEC’s Crypto Task Force on April 22 to discuss the initiative. The meeting was constructive, according to Reyes and Perkin. “They asked good questions,” Perkin said. “They’re in an information-gathering phase. They were engaged and open to discussion.”

Reyes has already signed regulatory cooperation agreements with countries such as Argentina and Paraguay. In his view, the SEC seems to be ahead of the curve when it comes to understanding the regulatory needs of digital assets, whereas regulators in other jurisdictions have tended to see crypto regulation from a traditional finance perspective.

“The quality of people that make up the SEC Crypto Task Force is quite impressive. They get it. They understand the technology,” Reyes said. “We were able to have discussions that were on point about what’s needed in order to regulate the technology… It was very refreshing.”

U.S. Senator Dave McCormick, the former chief executive of massive hedge fund Bridgewater Associates, is putting his own cash into bitcoin (BTC) as the committee he’s on is at the tip of the spear for a legislative effort to regulate the digital assets industry.

McCormick has made repeated recent investments in the Bitwise Bitcoin ETF worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, according to disclosures this week. Because of the ranges used in such lawmaker disclosures, the latest amounts invested last month can only be said to be between $310,000 and $700,000.

The new investment follows McCormick’s disclosure of as much as $450,000 in the Bitwise ETF in February, potentially bringing his total investment closer to a million. His investments represent the bulk of bitcoin investing in Congress this year. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Georgia Republican, invested a much smaller amount, favoring BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT).

The Republican senator from Pennsylvania, who has held a series of high-profile government posts throughout his career, is new to the Senate and was put on the Senate Banking’s Committee’s subcommittee that deals with digital assets. That’s the group of lawmakers likely closest to the coming action on crypto legislation that’s expected to move this year.

As a Senate candidate last year, the former hedge fund exec argued America needed to lead on crypto. He said during the subcommittee’s first digital assets hearing in February, «This Congress must work alongside President Trump to pass bipartisan digital asset legislation that will guide the future of innovation and secure a robust economic future for the U.S.»

While his bitcoin stake is outpacing other lawmakers, he’s been putting the bulk of his investments in municipal securities in recent months, the disclosures show.

Read More: Congress’ Most Prolific Crypto Trader Is a Georgia Trucking Operator