AirSwap Crypto Exchange Could Tokenize The Real Estate Market In New York

AirSwap, a US-based decentralized cryptocurrency exchange, is looking to tokenize the New York real estate market, one of the most expensive markets in the entire Western Hemisphere.  It has teamed up with Propellr, a broker-dealer registered with the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), for the effort, which will see AirSwap’s peer-to-peer trading protocol used to create an innovative trading platform.  

The new platform will allow brokers and their clients to tokenize securities and, in turn, trade these new tokens consistent with existing securities regulations.  The two companies plan to target the New York market because of its size and fluidity, but detailed information on how the system will work has not been released.

According to an AirSwap statement, “Ultimately, we hope to reduce the time to complete secondary market transactions of private securities from months to days, with the actual execution, clearing, and settlement taking place in a matter of minutes. With a non-custodial, no order book model, our technology is far better positioned for the private securities market than alternatives that take custody, use order book matching engines, and wrongly assume that private securities will trade with the same frequency as publicly traded securities or cryptocurrencies.”

Last year, AirSwap attracted $20 million during its initial coin offering (ICO), which was held across a two-month period from August to September.  It has raised a total of almost $25 million in funding. It recently announced that it was creating an over-the-counter crypto trading solution, currently offered as a beta product.  

AirSwap isn’t the only company looking to update the real estate market.  Last month, crypto startup Swarm announced that it was creating a platform that lists tokens that allow fractional share purchases of privately-owned RobinHood, the commission-free stock trading app.  Swarm works with brokers and managers to source equity from Robinhood employees who want to cash out prior to an eventual initial public offering (IPO) by the firm. Then, those shares are listed on the Swarm platform as SRC-20 tokens.