Last year, crypto believers in commercial real estate made a prediction.
Clear federal rules for digital assets, they said, would bring institutional money off the sidelines.
“Once the rules are clear, capital follows. People want to remove uncertainty,” Rilea Group President Diego Ojeda told Bisnow in July 2025.
Sixteen months later, he’s still waiting.
“It hasn’t happened,” Ojeda said last week. “There’s still uncertainty, and the rules are unclear … so we are still in a bit of a state of limbo.”
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The Clarity Act, which would set a federal framework for cryptocurrencies, passed the House 294-134 in July 2025 with bipartisan support. In the Senate, it failed a cloture vote 49-50 in September, 11 votes short of the 60 it needed to advance, and hasn’t moved since.
It was supposed to finish what Washington started that same week, when President Donald Trump signed a law regulating stablecoins. At the time, Bisnow reported that the two measures could open new rails for CRE finance — from faster, cheaper escrow and rent payments to buildings sold to investors in fractional, tokenized stakes.
Ojeda still wants the bill passed, but these days, Washington isn’t what’s holding the business back.
Crypto payments and tokenized property sales are already legal, and the deal numbers point to bigger problems, from a bitcoin slump that has left crypto holders feeling poorer to a tokenization firm that hasn’t closed a deal since before 2024.
“This year was pretty quiet, surprisingly,” said Ojeda, who describes his Miami-based development firm as an early adopter of crypto in CRE.
Rilea has closed eight crypto transactions worth about $15.7M across two Miami properties since the start of 2025. All of this year’s deals came in January, when a single investor spent $13.9M on five units at the Mohawk at Wynwood.
Last year, Rilea sold three units at the Rider Residences, two blocks away, to separate buyers for a total of $1.8M. The transactions settled in USDT, a dollar-pegged stablecoin.
Bitcoin now trades around $75K, down from more than $100K a year ago. Crypto holders expect it to rebound but are holding back in the meantime, Ojeda said.
“Even if you believe it’s going to come back up, you still feel less wealthy,” he said. “Until crypto comes back up, I do think we’ll see people on the sidelines.”
Without the bill, crypto assets remain under the overlapping jurisdiction of the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. The Clarity Act would put currencies like bitcoin squarely under the CFTC.
The crypto industry spent a reported $176M backing allies in the midterms, but some analysts believe the bill’s chances are now even lower after Democrats took control of the U.S. Senate.
That murkiness doesn’t stop smaller CRE players like Rilea from using crypto, but it raises compliance concerns for the legal departments of major institutions that might otherwise jump in, Ojeda said. He believes the Clarity Act would change that.
“At the mom-and-pop level, we’re still taking crypto … It’s all very legal,” he said.
Rilea is comfortable in that gray area, but many larger players aren’t, Ojeda said.
“It would be great for that to pass, to kind of open up the floodgates.”
Tokenization, which splits a property into digital shares sold on a blockchain, is a different matter.
Tokenized real estate offerings are securities, long overseen by the SEC, and the Clarity Act wouldn’t change that, said Ed Nwokedi, CEO of Houston-based tokenization firm RedSwan, which has been in the business since 2018.
“There’s confusion in the market,” Nwokedi said.
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Because both run on blockchains, investors new to the sector tend to lump crypto and tokenized assets like RedSwan’s together, he said, so the bill would still help.
“It looks like there’s no end to the tokenization of assets coming on chain,” Nwokedi added.
RedSwan’s own numbers tell a quieter story. The firm hasn’t closed a tokenized deal since before 2024, Nwokedi said. Those deals, which included an apartment building, a development project and a Houston office building, closed before RedSwan’s brokerage arm was licensed, he said.
That brokerage, which became active in 2024, “has yet to generate revenue from customers,” according to a filing covering 2025 that it submitted to the SEC in March.
“We’re doing things the right way,” Nwokedi said. “You’ll see filings as we close.”
He said RedSwan spent 2025 building inventory, shifting from small deals aimed at crypto holders to properties worth $50M or more that can draw institutional money. The firm now has $230M of property on its platform, up from $50M a year ago, he said. He declined to say how much of that investors have actually bought, citing confidentiality agreements with property owners.
RedSwan has six tokenized assets open to investors, including two Hamptons hotels, the Capri and the LDV at The Maidstone, a boutique hotel where guests typically pay about $600 a night, Nwokedi said.
Separately, RedSwan’s parent company reported managing about $165.3M in regulatory assets for seven businesses, all on a nondiscretionary basis, meaning the clients make the final investment decisions, according to an SEC filing last month. Nwokedi said he wasn’t sure whether that overlaps with the $230M.
He declined to name those clients but said they include “major institutions” looking to experiment with digital assets.
Others in the business have fared worse.
RealT, a crypto-based tokenization platform, announced plans to liquidate its entire portfolio, including about 700 Detroit homes it had split into fractional shares that drew $140M from investors around the world.
The July announcement, which followed months of financial strain, came almost exactly a year after the city of Detroit sued RealT for allegedly failing to maintain its portfolio. The company's attorney didn't respond to Bisnow's request for comment.
The case is ongoing. Judge Helal Farhat ruled Oct. 28 that the company can begin selling its properties that have received a certificate of occupancy, but that all proceeds must be placed in escrow, Outlier Media reported.
Nwokedi said RealT’s troubles say little about RedSwan’s model.
“You have better brands, better security, less risk,” he said. “Buying an asset that a company owns is totally different than buying a single-family home that’s foreclosed in Detroit.”
Ojeda is open to tokenization but hasn’t yet found a partner with enough of a track record for him to feel comfortable taking Rilea down that path.
“Even though we do take exploratory risks, like taking bitcoin, at the same time, we need to make sure everything is super aboveboard,” Ojeda said.
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