Freedom Index
Listen to the article
Bed Bath & Beyond has signed an agreement to acquire Tokens.com as part of a push into real estate finance and tokenized real-world assets, combining traditional financial products with blockchain-based infrastructure.
According to a company announcement on Monday, Tokens.com, a blockchain-focused financial infrastructure company, will be used to develop a platform focused on real estate finance, tokenized securities and other real-world assets (RWAs), integrating blockchain systems with regulated financial services.
Bed Bath & Beyond already owns or holds strategic stakes in blockchain businesses, including tZERO and GrainChain. Tokens.com will become a wholly owned subsidiary and is expected to rely on existing regulatory and operational infrastructure across the company’s blockchain businesses.
According to the announcement, the platform is expected to aggregate traditional and tokenized assets into a single interface, allowing users to view ownership, estimated values and available liquidity options, while supporting issuer-led tokenization, asset-backed lending and access to cryptocurrencies.
Capital markets functions, including tokenization, custody and trading, will run on tZERO, with mortgage and home-equity products provided through partners such as Figure Technologies.
The company said users accessing financing through the platform will be able to receive funds in cash or cryptocurrencies, including stablecoins. The platform is expected to become operational by mid-2026, subject to closing conditions.
Bed Bath & Beyond filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in April 2023 after years of declining sale and began liquidating its US retail operations. Following the bankruptcy, the Bed Bath & Beyond brand name and intellectual property were acquired by Overstock in a 2023 bankruptcy auction.
Overstock subsequently rebranded itself as Beyond Inc. and relaunched Bed Bath & Beyond as an online-focused business, according to Reuters.
Related: RedStone acquires Security Token Market, TokenizeThis conference
Companies expand into tokenized real-world assets
Bed Bath & Beyond’s push into tokenized RWAs, which use blockchain to represent traditional assets, comes as more companies and financial platforms adopt onchain financial infrastructure.
In October, Telegram moved into tokenized equities by enabling users to access around 60 tokenized US stocks through a partnership with Backed and Kraken.
ETHZilla (ETHZ), a former biotech company that repositioned itself as an Ethereum treasury company, has also expanded into RWA tokenization through a series of onchain credit deals.
In December, the company acquired a 20% stake in Karus in a $10 million transaction to issue tokenized auto-loan portfolios using AI underwriting; it also took a 15% stake in digital housing lender Zippy to bring manufactured-home loans onchain.
On Dec. 10, Mubadala Capital, the asset management arm of Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund, said it is working with Kaio to explore bringing its private-market investment strategies onchain.
According to data from RWA.xyz, the tokenized real-world asset market has grown to about $24.2 billion in distributed value, up from roughly $6.1 billion on Feb. 3 last year, an increase of nearly 300% year over year.
Magazine: 6 weirdest devices people have used to mine Bitcoin and crypto
Read the full article here
Fact Checker
Verify the accuracy of this article using AI-powered analysis and real-time sources.