Blockchain-Driven Real Estate Platform Closes Seed Funding Round Backed by Morgan Creek

Blockchain-based real estate platform RealBlocks has successfully closed a seed funding round backed by digital assets manager Morgan Creek Digital, a press release reveals Friday, Jan. 25.

Per the announcement, a $3.1 million round was led by United States-based commerce company Science Inc. with participation from Morgan Creek Digital, Zelkova Ventures, Ulu Ventures, and Cross Culture Ventures. The specific amounts of investment were not disclosed.

RealBlocks has designed a decentralized platform that tokenizes shares of private equity funds. It also allows real estate investors to sell shares at both domestic and international markets, accept payments in digital and fiat currencies, and enable peer-to-peer trading at its bulletin board. Explaining the investment, Anthony Pompliano, founder of Morgan Creek Digital, said:

“2019 is going to be an incredibly important year for blockchain projects [...] One of our core theses at Morgan Creek Digital has been that every stock, bond, currency, and commodity will be tokenized at some point in the future."

Last year, Morgan Creek Digital, backed by the institutional investment house Morgan Creek Capital with $1.5 billion in assets under management, launched its own digital asset index fund in partnership with crypto-focused Bitwise Asset Management.

The fund gives accredited investors, endowments, pensions and other approved institutional investors the possibility to gain indirect exposure to Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH) and eight other large market cap assets, excluding Ripple (XRP) and Stellar (XLM) as they were created through a pre-mine.

Blockchain is widely tested in real estate to store data, issue digital mortgages and moderate land registry. In June, the Netherlands’ Land Registry announced it would test blockchain technology for national real estate data. In October, the Chinese Bank of Communications successfully issued $1.3 billion of residential mortgage-backed securities using blockchain technology.