Asset Tokenization On The Blockchain — A Comprehensive Guide

Smita Verma
3 min readJun 8, 2021

Tokenization refers to the process of converting physical and non-physical assets into blockchain tokens. The notion of blockchain tokenization has recently garnered a lot of traction. Tokenization is gradually finding uses on the blockchain in conventional industries like real estate, equities, and artwork. So, why did tokenization become necessary in the first place?

Many people believe that asset tokenization began with the rise of Bitcoin. Tokenization, on the other hand, has been utilized as a data security mechanism for financial services since the 1970s. Tokenization is used by many traditional financial institutions to protect sensitive and secret information such as credit card data, personally identifying information, and financial records.

In general, the typical method of tokenization is replacing users’ sensitive data with a token, which is a string of non-sensitive characters and numbers. Let’s look at an example to better understand how traditional asset tokenization works. One of the most common uses of tokenization is in mobile payments.

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What is asset tokenization?

Asset tokenization is the process of producing tokens that represent a percentage of an asset’s value. Rather than purchasing stock in a business that owns the asset, investors may now buy direct, fractional ownership of the asset. This offers several significant advantages.

How It’s Used

Tokenization is used in certain hospitals for patient records and software applications for the security of login passwords. Additionally, tokenization has found uses in governance, such as voter registration. Asset tokenization in blockchain for government solutions can aid in the protection of a large amount of sensitive data. On the other hand, it’s also vital to consider why blockchain tokenization was created in the first place.

The bank then enters the customer’s information into a cryptographic procedure to generate tokens. The consumer then receives a token on their phone that represents their credit card. Any criminal attempting to get into the user’s phone would only be able to find the token, not their credit card information. Another significant feature of asset tokenization is that it is not limited to financial data.

It all started with cryptocurrencies, and now a new sort of token or digital asset dubbed CBDC, or central bank digital currencies, is expected to be introduced. Even though both CBDC and cryptocurrencies are digital assets or tokenized assets, they are very different in actuality.

Benefits of Asset Tokenization

Easily accessible-Tokenized assets may be accessible from anywhere in the globe, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Immutable-The token ownership is erased whenever someone buys it. If the owner sells it to someone else, however, it can be transferred from one person to another. Conflicts can be promptly resolved by looking to immutable records of ownership in the event of a disagreement.

Transparent-No one may claim to possess assets falsely since each record is kept on a shared and irreversible ledger. Everyone will have a clear view of the updated ledger of ownership data because of the ecosystem’s transparency.

Wrapping up

Asset tokenization allows more investors to participate in the acquisition of high-value products by providing built-in incentives for investors, owners, and exchanges, as well as custodians and other financial specialists. As the benefits of tokenization become more generally recognized and an ecosystem develops to accommodate asset owners who lack their own infrastructure, we predict the field to flourish, with tokenization eventually being one of the more solid value sources for digital assets.

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