HK Fintech Firm Gets License From Thai SEC For Ethereum Real Estate Project
The Thai subsidiary of Hong Kong-based Fintech start-up Fraction has been granted an initial coin offering portal license by the country’s Securities and Exchange Commission.
Fraction, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Hong Kong-based Fintech firm Fraction Group, has received a license allowing it to list and trade tokens for fractional ownership of physical or digital assets, the firm recently announced.
The license was granted through the Thai SEC’s official portal for initial coin offering (ICO) established back in 2018. The license lays out the foundation for Fraction’s upcoming service for asset digitization and fractionalization, referred to as an initial fraction offering (ICO).
With the license, the Hong Kong-based company can now link offline assets like real estate to non-fungible tokens (NFTs), digitize them, and offer a fraction of them to interested parties.
The firm expects to list the first IFOs for subscriptions in Q1 2022, focusing on tokens for properties in collaboration with local real estate firms. According to the announcement, Fraction is exploring an IFO with an aggregate value of more than $460 million.
Eka Nirapathpongporn, Co-founder and CEO of Fraction said:
“We are proud to announce the first SEC-regulated unified platform that leverages the blockchain to digitize, list and trade tangible assets. After 3 years of laying the technical foundations and the real world legal structure, we have obtained regulatory approval and can now enable financial inclusion, letting small investors participate in attractive asset classes that used to be previously inaccessible.”
Shaun Sales, Co-founder and CTO of Fraction commented:
“Fraction offers the first SEC-approved implementation of distributed ledger technology based on the Ethereum blockchain for managing multi-asset fractional ownership. We are glad to be forerunners in this convergence of finance and ledger technology. While many have been talking about it or trying to do it, our platform is completed, already up and running, and ready to list public assets.”
“Now you can legally own a part of this villa — maybe 1% of it — rather than having to fork out $5 million to buy the whole thing,” Fraction co-founder and CEO Eka Nirapathpongporn said. The minimum amount to participate in an IFO would be around $150, he added.
The industry of tokenized property has remained relatively niche due to the technology’s nascent status and regulatory uncertainty about such offerings. According to estimations by British accountancy network Moore Global, the tokenized real estate market could hit $1.4 trillion in the next five years if just 0.5% of the total global property market were to be tokenized.
