Australia's property tokenisation in practice: funds, pilots and gaps

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Kooky

Builder of Shaka, the payment router that pays every agent their commission on closing date.

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Tokenised real estate is talked about in Australia far more than it is documented. The phrase suggests a building cut into digital pieces. The products that Australian companies and regulators have described in public are something else: a token standing for a unit in a fund, a share in a company that invests in a property lending fund, or an entry in a register of co-owners. None of the sources read for this guide describes a token that is itself a registered interest in land.

This guide sets out the position as read in October 2026. It covers the property-linked products that have been described in published sources, the way each is built, who each is offered to, the use cases of the Reserve Bank of Australia's Project Acacia that touch property, funds or securitised loans, what banks and trading venues did in that project, and the points on which the record is silent. It is a guide to market practice. The law that decides when a token is a financial product is a separate subject and is not repeated here. Every company statement below is the company's own, with its date.

Reserve Bank of Australia media releases of 10 July 2025 and 18 May 2026; Wisr Limited statement of 11 December 2025.

Three shapes behind one label

Read side by side, the published descriptions fall into three shapes.

The first is the tokenised fund unit. An investor holds a unit in a fund, and a token is issued that mirrors that unit. The fund, not the investor, owns the property or the property interest. The housing fund described by DigitalX in 2023 is of this kind, and so is the managed investment scheme pilot run by Catena Digital in Project Acacia.

The second is the tokenised share in a holding vehicle. In Project Acacia, the firm Canvas tested tokens representing shares in special purpose vehicles, companies set up for one purpose, which in turn invest in a real estate credit fund. The investor here is two steps away from any building: the token is a share, the share is in a vehicle, the vehicle holds an interest in a fund, and the fund lends against property.

The third is the co-ownership register. A university article published in August 2023 describes Bricklet as a fractional property investment company running a blockchain-based register of co-owners. The register records who holds which share; the article does not say how that record relates to the land title register of any state.

The Reserve Bank's final report on Project Acacia, dated May 2026, gives a vocabulary for this. It distinguishes a digital twin token, where the ledger record is information about an asset that remains recorded on what it calls a traditional asset registry, from a digital native structure, which assumes that the law recognises ledger-based ownership and settlement finality. Every property-linked product described below is, on its own description, closer to the first.

The 2023 housing fund built on a token

The earliest product in the sources is the Housing Asset Reference Token fund, known as HxART, described in an article published on 8 August 2023 by the business school of the University of New South Wales. It is a university publication that presents the work as a partnership with DigitalX, so it is best read as the participants' own account, and it is the only source read for this guide on this fund and on Bricklet.

According to that article, DigitalX was founded in 2014 and, after a strategic review in 2019, concentrated on digital asset funds management for institutional investors. The article reports the company's chief executive describing HxART as Australia's first funds management product offering exposure to real-world assets in digital token form. That is the company's claim, as relayed in August 2023, and no independent source read for this guide tests it.

The structure, as the article gives it, runs as follows. The fund holds residential properties bought for home buyers who have finance but lack the deposit. The fund covers the deposit and becomes a co-owner of the home. An investor buys an HxART token, which the article describes as a share token of the fund pool and a digital twin of the fund unit. The article also names a wider DigitalX product, the Asset Reference Token fund, which it says gives wholesale investors access to fractionalised assets across cash, property, commodities, private equity, private debt and bonds.

Two technology partners are named. The article names Bricklet as DigitalX's pilot partner and says Canvas Connect validates assets for the fund.

What the article leaves out matters as much. It gives no amount in Australian dollars: no fund size and no minimum investment. It gives no launch date and no location for any property. It does not mention the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) or any licence. The current status of the fund is unknown: whether it is open, how large it became and what it holds in October 2026 cannot be stated from a single article of August 2023.

A register of co-owners

Bricklet appears in the same August 2023 article as DigitalX's pilot partner. The article describes it as a fractional property investment company that runs the Australian Property Co-Ownership Register, which it calls a blockchain-based shared equity platform.

That single description, dated August 2023, is all that can be reported here, and Bricklet's current status is unknown. The company's own website could not be read for this guide, so its current terms are not described: what a buyer of a fraction legally holds, whether the offer is open to retail buyers, what a fraction costs, what fees apply and how a holder sells. The 2023 article does not answer those questions either.

The gap is worth naming because it marks the line between two different things. A register of co-owners kept on a distributed ledger is a record. Whether that record is also the legal evidence of ownership is the question the Reserve Bank's final report lists among the legal issues the project highlighted: the structuring of on-chain records so that they provide enforceable evidence of asset ownership and terms.

Project Acacia in dates and numbers

Most of what is documented about tokenised assets in Australia comes from one programme. Project Acacia was run by the Reserve Bank and the Digital Finance Cooperative Research Centre (DFCRC), and its subject was wholesale markets, meaning dealings between institutions.

The counts differ from one document to the next, and all three are given here. The Reserve Bank's release of 10 July 2025 said 24 use cases had been conditionally selected: 19 pilots involving real money and real assets, and five proofs of concept involving simulated transactions. The DFCRC's summary of use cases, dated August 2025, sets out 23 entries under 14 lead organisations as read for this guide. The Reserve Bank's release of 18 May 2026 said 20 use cases had been developed and tested. The sources do not explain which entries fell away.

The 14 lead organisations named in July 2025 were Australian Bond Exchange, ANZ, Australian Payments Plus, Canvas, Catena Digital, Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Fireblocks, Forte Tech Solutions, Imperium Markets, Northern Trust, NotCentralised, ProspEx Group, Westpac and Zerocap. The asset classes listed in that release were fixed income, private markets, trade receivables and carbon credits. Real estate was not on the list. ASIC gave participants regulatory relief, and the final report describes it as opt-in exemptions from licensing requirements.

The one use case with real estate in it

One lead organisation's entry in the August 2025 summary contains the words real estate. Canvas, which has two pilot entries under a single description, tested tokens representing shares in special purpose vehicles that invest in two things: a real estate credit fund and short-dated Australian Government bonds.

According to the summary, the pilot covered primary issuance, secondary trading, distributions and lending against the tokenised shares. The settlement asset was the pilot wholesale central bank digital currency, a form of central bank money issued for the project. The ledger was Canvas Connect, described as private and permissioned. The investors were described as including family offices and investment firms, and none was named.

Several things follow from that description, and several do not. The asset is a credit fund, so the exposure is to loans secured on or connected with property, not to ownership of buildings. The summary does not say what the fund lends against, how large it is, who manages it or what an investor had to commit. The Reserve Bank's final report of May 2026 lists a Canvas private credit fund settled in wholesale central bank digital currency among its use cases, which is consistent with the earlier summary. In a speech on 25 March 2026, Brad Jones, the Reserve Bank's Assistant Governor (Financial System), listed private credit funds among the assets tested and said they were settled in central bank money.

Fund units and securitised loans

Three further entries sit close to property without being property. They are set out because fund units and securitised loans are the structures the property-linked products above also rely on.

Catena Digital's pilot tested tokenised units in a managed investment scheme, a collective investment structure. The summary says a large investment management firm took part and does not name it. Nothing in the summary says the scheme held property. Mr Jones's March 2026 speech said investment funds were settled only in private tokenised money, which matches the stablecoin used here.

NotCentralised's pilot tested the issue and settlement of a tokenised asset-backed security through a bond exchange, with what the summary calls the full securitisation lifecycle on the ledger. On the underlying loans the sources differ. The August 2025 summary describes a security backed by receivables and invoices. A statement dated 11 December 2025, issued by Wisr Limited and carried on Redbelly Network's site, announced what it called the Smart ABS Pilot under Project Acacia and tied it to the Wisr Freedom Trust 2025-1, which Wisr described as a A$250 million trust backed by a pool of personal loans. Both descriptions are reported here; neither involves home loans.

The Wisr statement also shows how roles are divided in such a structure. Wisr said it originated and services the loans and was building the digital twin. NotCentralised was named as lead entity and structurer. Redbelly Network was named as the provider of the blockchain infrastructure. AMAL, part of the IQ-EQ group, was named for the trustee and servicing roles. The statement said first results were expected in the first quarter of 2026. It gave no figure for time or cost saved and did not say who the investors were.

ProspEx Group's entry is included for one reason: it is the only entry that uses the word fractionalised. Its asset is a mining royalty, not a building.

What banks and trading venues tested

Three banks were lead participants, according to the July 2025 release: ANZ, Commonwealth Bank and Westpac. None of their entries in the August 2025 summary involves property or home loans.

ANZ had two entries. One was a pilot settling tokenised trade payables, using wholesale central bank digital currency to buy A$DC on a private network. The other was a proof of concept on a corporate bond, comparing a private network with Ethereum.

Commonwealth Bank had one proof of concept, simulating repurchase agreements secured on Australian Government Securities held on a digital registry, settled in wholesale central bank digital currency or the bank's deposit tokens.

Westpac had one proof of concept, simulating near real-time settlement of tokenised asset trades in ordinary bank money over the existing real-time payment infrastructure, without issuing any new form of money.

On the venue side, Australian Bond Exchange piloted secondary trading of a tokenised corporate bond on Redbelly Network, and Imperium Markets, described in the summary as an ASIC-licensed marketplace, piloted term deposits, certificates of deposit and annuities. Outside the project, Mr Jones said in March 2026 that ASIC had licensed one entity to trade and settle shares in private companies and units in managed investment schemes, and had licensed several firms to provide tokenised assets and stablecoins. He did not name them. The Australian Securities Exchange is not named as a lead participant in any source read for this guide.

Who these products are offered to

The published descriptions point one way: to wholesale and institutional investors.

• Project Acacia was a wholesale markets project by design, according to the Reserve Bank.
• The Canvas pilot's investors were described as family offices and investment firms.
• DigitalX's wider token fund was described in August 2023 as giving access to wholesale investors.
• The Catena Digital pilot involved a large investment management firm.

An article by a partner of the law firm Thomson Geer, published without a visible date on the site of the Association of Corporate Counsel, describes the general pattern. It says tokenised units "function similarly to traditional units in a managed investment scheme", that the fund is most often a managed investment scheme or a corporate collective investment vehicle whose operator holds an Australian financial services licence, and that managers must still apply identity checks and investor classification rules. It adds that tokens may be held in digital wallets or by regulated third-party custodians, depending on the structure, and that liquidity remains subject to the fund's own rules. The same article says real estate tokenisation is gaining traction, without naming an Australian product.

On minimums, the answer is short. No source read for this guide states a minimum investment, a token price or a fee for any Australian property-linked token product. The Thomson Geer article gives no thresholds or minimums. Where a figure matters to a reader, it has to come from the offer document of the product concerned.

What was reported back

The findings released on 18 May 2026 are stated at the level of the whole project. The Reserve Bank said tokenisation, with digital money and settlement innovation, could improve the efficiency, functionality and resilience of wholesale markets, and that several challenges to scale needed deeper analysis. The DFCRC cited faster settlement, lower counterparty risk, better capital efficiency and automated asset servicing. In his March 2026 speech, Mr Jones added access to new investor profiles and funding channels to the benefits participants reported, and gave no settlement times or cost figures. The speech's own caution was plain: "Tokenisation by itself is no silver bullet."

The estimates attached to the project are research figures, not results. The July 2025 release quoted the DFCRC's chief scientist as saying gains could be in the order of A$19 billion a year. The May 2026 release cited DFCRC research estimating A$24 billion in annual economic gains from digital finance innovation. The final report attributes to the DFCRC an estimate of A$2 billion a year for fixed-income markets alone, and gives no separate figure for funds or for property.

Real estate does appear in the final report, once, as a possibility. The report says fractionalisation may be particularly advantageous for certain assets and names real estate, unlisted private equity and credit funds, and some commodities. It describes no real estate use case. For scale, the same report says that more than 80 per cent of tokenised asset value globally is private credit and United States Treasuries.

Property enters the March 2026 speech from another direction. Mr Jones used the existing property settlement process, in which titles are exchanged against settlement balances set aside in advance, as a comparison for a proposed mechanism that synchronises a ledger with the payment system. The speech also reported that participants preferred digital twin issuance to native issuance in the near term, for legal and operational reasons.

In the Australian record, the token sits on a fund unit, a company share or a register entry. None is described as a registered interest in land.

The 2026 Act and what is still unknown

Parliament's digital assets legislation, the Corporations Amendment (Digital Assets Framework) Act 2026, is the subject of a separate guide to the law. For market practice, the question is what operators and industry bodies say it changes for them. No statement by a platform operator, a fund manager or an industry body on that point was read for this guide. The Reserve Bank's March 2026 speech refers only to forthcoming licensing and digital asset platform reforms, and lists as open questions product designations and the licensing of digital market infrastructure.

The programme after Acacia is set out without firm dates, with one exception. The May 2026 release lists closer cooperation between industry and regulators, a possible sandbox for digital financial market infrastructure, consideration of tokenised government bonds, industry work on interoperable bank deposit tokens and a consultation on the Reserve Bank's settlement infrastructure. The DFCRC's project page says expressions of interest for a tokenisation advisory group and a deposit token working group closed on 20 August 2026.

The points that cannot be settled from the published sources at 10 October 2026 are these.

• Live products. Whether any tokenised property fund is open to investors in Australia today, and on what terms, is not established by the sources read.
• Minimums, prices and fees. None is stated for any product described here.
• Retail access. Every description points to wholesale or institutional investors; no retail offer is described.
• The link to title. No source explains how a token or a ledger entry relates to a state or territory land title register.
• The real estate credit fund. Its manager, size, loan book and investors are not given.
• The underlying loans in the securitisation pilot. One source says receivables and invoices, another personal loans.
• Use case counts. The sources give 24 selected, 23 described and 20 tested, without a reconciliation.
• Results by use case. The published findings are general; outcomes for individual pilots, including the two nearest to property, are not reported in the material read.
• The Act in practice. How operators of property-linked token products intend to respond to the 2026 Act is not on the record read for this guide.

What exists on the public record is a set of fund structures and pilots, most of them wholesale and most of them finished. Whether any becomes a standing product is for later documents to show.

Kooky, from Shaka

Kooky edits Agents Estate and builds Shaka, the payment router he made for real estate professionals. One payment comes in, and every agent, agency and party in the deal receives their signed share on closing date.

About Kooky and Shaka →