Tokenization of real-world assets (RWA) is reshaping capital-markets infrastructure by embedding traditionally illiquid instruments—ranging from private-equity stakes to commercial real estate—within programmable digital tokens on distributed-ledger networks. This paper investigates three interlocking dimensions of this transformation. First, it dissects the legal and operational challenges that arise as asset rights migrate from paper certificates to cryptographically secured ledgers, highlighting jurisdictional uncertainty, fragmented custody rules, and the need for harmonized disclosure standards. Second, it evaluates emerging smart-contract governance models—including multi-signature escrow, on-chain compliance oracles, and upgradeable proxy contracts—and assesses their effectiveness in enforcing regulatory constraints, mitigating counter-party risk, and sustaining asset-life-cycle events such as corporate actions or rental-income distributions. Third, it analyzes the democratizing potential of tokenization, demonstrating how fractional ownership and 24/7 secondary liquidity can lower minimum investment thresholds, widen geographic reach, and broaden participation beyond accredited investors, while also outlining the attendant risks of market fragmentation and algorithmic discrimination. Using a mixed-methods approach that couples comparative legal analysis with event-study evidence from pilot tokenized-asset offerings, the paper offers a governance framework that balances innovation incentives with systemic-risk safeguards. The findings contribute to policy debates on digital-asset regulation, inform institutional-design choices for custodians and exchanges, and chart a research agenda for measuring tokenization’s long-run impact on market efficiency, financial inclusion, and asset-pricing dynamics.
Nikhil Jarunde (Fri,) studied this question.