Kadena issues first grant from $25M real estate tokenization fund in Bank of England pilot

Public PoW blockchain Kadena makes its first capital deployment from a $50 million grants program, backing UK startup CurveBlock within the Financial institution of England’s Digital Securities Sandbox.

Kadena has awarded the primary grant from its new $50 million ecosystem fund, allocating $400,000 to CurveBlock, a UK-based startup constructing tokenized actual property inside a regulated monetary sandbox.

The milestone marks a pivotal intersection between open blockchain infrastructure and government-led experimentation with digital securities, underscoring rising institutional urge for food for compliant pathways into tokenized real-world property (RWAs).

CurveBlock is the primary actual property agency accepted into the UK’s Digital Securities Sandbox (DSS), a joint initiative of the Financial institution of England and the Monetary Conduct Authority.

The DSS permits blockchain-native monetary devices to function below modified CSD and change guidelines by 2028, enabling the issuance, buying and selling, and settlement of digital securities with relaxed regulatory constraints.

$50 million tokenization fund

Kadena’s grant is the primary deployment from its newly expanded $50 million program, half of which ($25M) is explicitly earmarked for RWA tokenization.

The initiative is designed to help builders engaged on tokenized debt, actual property, and different compliant asset rails, with candidates eligible for equity-free funding, infrastructure help, and code evaluation.

CurveBlock’s grant displays rising curiosity in aligning public blockchain tech with real-world institutional demand.

“Our Grants Program and token requirements are important to enabling compliant, scalable tokenization,” mentioned Stuart Popejoy, CEO of Kadena. “We’re doubling down on ecosystem real-world use circumstances establishments want.”

The DSS launched in late 2024 and represents one of many world’s most superior makes an attempt at legally enabling digital securities experimentation.

Taking part corporations can scale initiatives by a collection of regulatory gates. CurveBlock not too long ago cleared Gate 1 with help from Kadena and can proceed testing reside actual property tokenization flows over the approaching months.

Annelise Osborne, Kadena’s Chief Enterprise Officer and former Moody’s govt, believes {that a} lack of infrastructure, not institutional curiosity, is the actual bottleneck for RWA adoption. “With this $25 million, I actually hope we’ll have much more builders and much more fintechs that come from the tokenization facet… I’m an enormous believer that they’re going to develop,” she instructed American Banker.

Osborne has additionally famous the significance of proof-of-work infrastructure, like Kadena’s Chainweb, in delivering scalable and safe tokenization rails.

Proof of Work in tokenized actual property

Kadena’s strategy differs from many rivals in that it combines parallelized PoW chains with upcoming EVM compatibility and a token commonplace designed for compliance.

The grant program’s broader aim is to speed up the adoption of this infrastructure for real-world purposes, significantly the place on-chain permissioning and regulatory controls are crucial.

The true property tokenization market alone is projected to develop to $19.4 billion by 2033, with current months seeing a 260% surge in total RWA market cap to $23 billion.

Establishments together with Goldman Sachs, HSBC, and BlackRock are actively piloting tokenized securities, suggesting that demand for compliant blockchain rails is now not hypothetical.

Kadena’s grant to CurveBlock is a notable sign that public-chain infrastructure could but play a central function in that evolution.

If profitable, the experiment may form not simply the way forward for tokenized actual property within the UK, but additionally affect US and EU approaches to sandbox-based digital finance.

At a Look – Kadena’s RWA Grant Program

Whole Pool: $50 million
Focus Areas: Actual-world asset tokenization, Chainweb EVM, AI x Blockchain
Funding Sort: Fairness-free grants
Help: Technical help, code critiques, UI suggestions, advertising and marketing amplification
Timeline: Rolling purposes, 2–4 week evaluation cycle

Key Milestones