On January 29, 2025, EstateX officially launched its real estate tokenization platform, enabling individuals to invest in fractional property shares for as little as $100.
In this interview, co-founder Bart De Bruijn shares his vision for bridging traditional real estate with blockchain technology.
Reflecting on the early days of EstateX, De Bruijn explains that the idea was born out of a need to address housing affordability in the Netherlands:
“We saw a huge housing shortage in the Netherlands. The average 30-year-old couldn’t even get on the property market, let alone invest. We decided to link property to blockchain and build a complete end-to-end regulated ecosystem.”
Since then, EstateX has built a legal framework spanning Europe and the United States, ensuring compliance and transparency. The company has also partnered with regulated registrars in Germany and secured backing from industry giants such as Google and Microsoft.
Highlighting the project’s momentum, De Bruijn shares a milestone achievement:
“We recently sold our first tokenized property—a holiday resort in Cape Verde—within five minutes.”
De Bruijn is quick to clarify a common misconception about real estate tokenization:
“Fractionalizing a property isn’t new. What blockchain brings is transparency, daily payouts, high liquidity, and the ability to trade fractional ownership instantly.”
Unlike traditional Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs), which pay out rental income quarterly, EstateX enables investors to earn daily rental income. Additionally, Bruijn emphasizes the platform’s liquidity features:
“Make your real estate assets so liquid that you can buy your groceries with them.” This revolutionary form of liquidity, facilitated through EstateX Pay, is beginning to bridge the gap between traditional finance and crypto, making real estate a form of NFT and transforming it into a dynamic asset class.
De Bruijn breaks down the EstateX process into two key steps:
EstateX’s first tokenized property was a luxury beach resort managed by TUI. Investors benefited from:
According to De Bruijn, this model creates new opportunities for both retail and institutional investors.
While tokenization offers exciting possibilities, De Bruijn cautions against seeing it as a universal solution. He provides a practical example:
“No one gives you money for free. If you tokenize your property, you’ll likely need to pay rent on the percentage you no longer own. It’s about making the numbers work for your goals.”
This pragmatic approach ensures that tokenization isn’t oversold but is instead positioned as a flexible tool for specific financial needs, such as raising funds for renovations or flipping properties.
EstateX has prioritized regulatory compliance and investor protection from the outset. De Bruijn outlines the measures in place:
He reassures investors about the platform’s resilience:
“If anything happens to EstateX, you can go to the registrar or regulator, show your token, and prove ownership.”
Looking ahead, De Bruijn sees EstateX as a leader in the tokenization space. With major financial institutions like BlackRock and JPMorgan embracing tokenization, he predicts:
“Tokenization is in its infancy. In the next bull run, it will be the narrative that kicks everything off. By 2030, all asset classes will go digital” explains De Bruijn. In the coming years, De Bruijn explains that “the ESX blockchain will be EVM-compatible, with specific layer-1 chains for asset classes like real estate, gold, and sports teams, unified by a layer-0 chain.”
With these developments, De Bruijn envisions EstateX becoming “the Binance of tokenization,” offering seamless asset management for both retail and institutional investors.