THE FEATURE Real Estate ICOs Are Moving In, But Investors Aren't Floored A house on a blockchain? That's the future a number of initial coin offering (ICO) issuers envision, one in which tokenized pieces of the property could be tracked and traded via a shared database. In this way, the tokens would allow for what entrepreneurs are calling "fractional ownership," or the ability for a real estate owner to split up their home and sell off equity stakes. Not only would this allow a homeowner to sell some of the home's equity should they need extra money, but it would also allow the equity to be freely traded until, one day, the home was sold, at which point the homeowner and equity owner could both enjoy any gain in the home's value. It's notable a trend given the excitement the concept saw among earlier blockchain startups that were building businesses around private or permissioned blockchains. But this new round of hype comes from token sellers who believe the crypto token model, in which a digital asset is sold and traded, could bring benefits to perhaps the most fixed of the fixed assets markets. In fact, there are at least four ICO issuers right now with a real-estate component – BitRent, a way to speed up financing construction projects; Etherty, real-estate management through equity access; Caviar, a fund that tempers the volatility of crypto investments with loans to real estate projects; and Trust, a way to tokenize equity in real estate and other real-world assets. No doubt, there will be more. | 
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