Dubai, UAE – As institutional capital floods into real-world asset tokenization, OneAsset founder Sonia Shaw issued a stark warning to the industry: the majority of projects claiming to tokenize real estate are delivering digital IOUs, not enforceable property rights.
“Investors are being sold a vision of fractional property ownership, but what they’re actually getting is a token with no legal backbone,” said Shaw. “If your token doesn’t map to a bankruptcy-remote SPV with independent fiduciary oversight, you don’t own real estate. You own a speculation tool.”
Shaw’s comments challenge the broader RWA sector at a moment of rapid expansion. Tokenized real estate initiatives have attracted significant attention and capital, but Shaw argues that most have skipped the “boring but fatal” layers required for institutional credibility: enforceable legal rights, transfer controls, auditable reporting, and lifecycle servicing.
“The industry is obsessed with the mint button,” she said. “Everyone wants to issue a token and call it innovation. But tokenization isn’t about the moment of issuance. It’s about what happens after; distributions, compliance, reporting, and the legal certainty that your ownership survives a court challenge.”
OneAsset is taking a fundamentally different approach. The company is building institutional-grade infrastructure for tokenized real estate, structuring each asset within bankruptcy-remote SPVs with independent trustees and custodians. The platform is designed to be custody-agnostic and venue-neutral, positioning OneAsset as an upstream infrastructure provider rather than a consumer-facing trading platform.
Shaw acknowledged that this approach is slower and less flashy than competing projects that rush to market with live offerings. But she argued that speed without structural integrity risks repeating the failures of earlier crypto cycles.
“We’re seeing the same patterns we saw in 2021: projects promising yield, promising liquidity, promising democratization, without building the legal and operational foundations that make those promises credible,” Shaw said. “When the next cycle turns, the projects that skipped the infrastructure work will disappear. The ones that built properly will still be standing.”
OneAsset is currently in the late stages of the regulatory licensing process in the UAE and is not yet authorized to offer tokenization services to the public. The company has emphasized that it will not launch any live offerings until all necessary licenses are secured and its infrastructure has been thoroughly validated.
Shaw’s critique comes amid growing scrutiny of the RWA sector from regulators and institutional investors. As traditional finance players explore tokenized assets, the gap between marketing narratives and structural reality has become a focal point of due diligence.
“Real estate tokenization will transform global investing but only if it’s built on foundations that institutions recognize and regulators trust,” Shaw said. “That means doing the unsexy work first. Legal engineering. Fiduciary structures. Compliance workflows. If you’re not building those, you’re not building tokenized real estate. You’re building something else.”
About OneAsset
OneAsset is a tokenization infrastructure provider turning institutional-grade UAE real estate into compliant, liquid, and globally accessible digital assets. By focusing on legal engineering, asset servicing, and partner-friendly interoperability, OneAsset builds the “rails” that enable banks, custodians, and exchanges to offer tokenized real estate with confidence. Headquartered in the UAE, the company is leveraging the region’s forward-thinking regulatory environment to build the blueprint for global real-world asset markets. OneAsset is currently in a pre-license stage and is not authorized to offer tokenization services to the public
