Kadena, a fintech company focused on distributed ledger solutions for businesses, launched a $25 million grant program Tuesday for development of startups working on tokenized real estate and real-world asset (RWA) adoption.
"With this $25 million, I really hope we'll have a lot more builders and a lot more fintechs that come from the tokenization side," said Annelise Osborne, chief business officer for Kadena. "I'm a huge believer that they're going to grow. There's a lot of large companies that are starting now that will do really well in this ecosystem."
Kadena was launched in 2017 by two senior leaders on JPMorgan's blockchain project, Juno, the predecessor to Chase's Onyx. Will Martino, the lead developer who previously worked at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, teamed up with Stuart Popejoy, the head of Juno, to create Kadena.
Their goal has been to build a blockchain that can be used at a greater scale than others while maintaining the proof-of-work algorithm. The team believes tokenized real estate has the potential to be the next industry trend and is a step forward in marrying traditional finance and decentralized finance.
Osborne joined the company last summer from Arca Labs where she was an executive and her focus has been on asset tokenization.
Real-world asset tokenization allows individuals to invest in a part of something – be it a song, a sports franchise, a brand, a piece of real estate. Rhianna's producer issued shares of the royalties of her song "Bitch Better Have My Money" as an NFT following her Super Bowl halftime show in 2023.
"It allows people the opportunity to invest in something they like, something they believe in and have interest in," Osborne said. "It could be music, it could be your favorite artist, it could be your sports team. It just opens up the world to a new type of alternative asset investing that right now only the ultra-high-net-worth have access to."
"The idea is, how can I have a share of an alternative investment right now? The alternative investment universe isn't really offered for retail investors," Osborne said, adding she sees it as commonplace in five to ten years from now. This is a step in that process."
She gave the example of someone owning a share of a commercial real estate building in Manhattan, even though they don't have tens of millions to invest outright in the project.
"This offers the opportunity to own a share of some," she said.
Through the new Real World Asset Grant Program, Kadena is hoping to foster that leap forward.
"It's really focused on finding the opportunities in companies," she said. "To build and grow and encourage them and encourage innovation."
The launch coincides with the company's RWA token standard, offering compliance and permissioning features for regulated securities and digital assets.
"What we're doing by launching our RWA token standard is really putting the permissioning and privacy aspects in place that allow financial instruments to be optioned, and it could be financial instruments, or it could be other real world assets as well."
Kadena's grants committee will assess projects that apply for the support for viability and aim to begin sending out funds in the next 12 to 24 months.
