About
What is onchain real estate?
What onchain real estate actually means
Onchain real estate is property whose ownership and economic rights are represented as digital tokens on a blockchain. Instead of paper deeds, spreadsheets, and escrow accounts, the record of who owns what, and what they are owed, lives on a shared registry that everyone can verify.
A token can represent a whole building, a share of a fund, or a slice of the cash flows from a single asset. Because the rules are written into the token itself, transfers, distributions, and compliance checks can happen programmatically.
Why it matters now
Estimates put $4 trillion of real estate moving onchain by 2035. Regulators in the US, UAE, EU, and Asia-Pacific have moved from skepticism to active frameworks, and institutions are running live pilots rather than writing memos.
The shift is no longer theoretical. Regulated exchanges are listing tokenized securities, and land departments are opening secondary markets for tokenized property. The infrastructure that was missing five years ago now exists.
What changes for owners and investors
Ownership becomes programmable: title, cap tables, and distributions live in one place. Liquidity becomes the default: settlement that took 60 days can take 60 seconds. Distribution becomes global: a developer, an allocator, and an investor on three continents can transact on the same rails. Transparency becomes built in: the registry is the single source of truth.
How real estate firms are starting
Most firms start with education, then a pilot, then scale. The first step is understanding where tokenization actually creates value for your specific assets and goals. From there, a focused pilot, often a private, regulated offering, proves the model before any wider rollout.
The firms that move first build the relationships, the playbook, and the credibility that compound as the market matures.
Who we are
Onchain Real Estate was founded by Stéphane Doueihi and Jacob Merdjanian — rooted in Montreal, operating globally. Most people in tokenized real estate come from one world or the other, real estate or crypto. Stéphane and Jacob have built careers in both.
The two met in Montreal, running one of the city's top real estate clubs — Stéphane founded it, and Jacob later carried the torch — and there they began doing something they've done ever since: bringing the industry together at events. From there, both spent the better part of a decade in traditional real estate, delivering projects at institutional scale for leading Canadian developers, retailers, and real estate investment trusts. When blockchain began to reshape finance, they moved to the front lines of it, working hands-on with early-stage companies building decentralized trading, liquidity, real-world assets, and decentralized AI — and convening that world at events of their own.
Onchain Real Estate is where those two worlds meet. They've lived real estate's friction — construction, liens, leasing — and came to onchain technology through finance and markets, not real estate, where they saw at once how much of that friction it could take away. That's what lets them sit across from a developer or a fund manager and turn a complex, fast-moving shift into clear, executable steps, free of the hype — meeting each firm wherever it is on the journey.
We're here for the long term. Real estate is full of problems that blockchain is genuinely built to solve — opacity, friction, and cost — and bringing transparency, honesty, and efficiency to how property is owned and traded doesn't just make the market work better; it makes it fairer and more accessible to everyone in it: the people who build, buy, sell, rent, and invest. That's the better world we believe this technology can unlock, and the one we're here to build.