According to specialist Andreas Blazoudakis, founder and CEO of Netspaces, blockchain is a way of bringing asset value into the internet:

“The internet is about 40 years old and it has digitized everything: delivery, taxis, tickets, e-commerce… it feels like it’s everywhere.

But there’s one thing that stayed outside of it: what holds real asset value.”

Andreas highlights that this happens because today’s internet is private, built on silos controlled by a handful of companies: Google, Apple, Amazon, Meta… You can’t transfer assets on top of a structure that belongs to someone else.

“Blockchain is precisely this extension of the internet: Web3. Web2 is the internet we use today; Web3 is an internet designed for the transfer of assets.

It works like a giant ledger that records balances and transfers between wallets. Like: someone has 100 thousand, transferred 80 thousand, now has 20 thousand, and that stays recorded.

The big difference is that it records everything in a decentralized way. When a transaction happens, the network activates thousands of computers around the world to validate it and generate a code, like a verification digit. The first one to solve it records the block and receives a reward.

And since each block references the previous one, if you try to change an old block, everything breaks.”

The executive explains that there are two ways to apply this model in the real estate market. You can either create a token tied to a real estate value (a financial product within capital markets), which allows you to tokenize rental receivables from a contract and distribute them to buyers of those receivables. Or you can tokenize a property itself — which is more complex.

“Which side is more used, and where did it start? The market started on the financial side. A more speculative side: buying debt, buying tokenized receivables, tokenized CRIs.

Not only in Brazil, but worldwide.

Over the past five years, people talked a lot about this, and there was little talk about real estate ownership tokens. But around a year ago — a year and a bit — the market began to look more closely at ‘real’ real estate tokens.”

Andreas explains that tokenization does not replace property registry records or traditional contracts: it creates a digital layer above them. The property continues to exist in the “paper world,” but contract rights become represented by a token, which can be transferred more easily:

“Tokenization doesn’t tear up the paper. The registry record still exists, and the purchase and sale contract still exists too.

What changes is that I link a token to that contract, as if the phone became the ‘key’ to that right. Instead of transferring paper to you, I transfer the token, and the right goes along with it.

And that creates a programmable electronic layer: you can automate settlement, collateral, and credit.”

According to the specialist, the idea is that Web3 will bring assets into the internet.

“Today, the world’s wealth is basically in two places: fiat currency and real estate — and both are being tokenized.”

He notes that the financial market made this transition decades ago with internet banking and, more recently, with PIX. Real estate, however, is still “dead wealth”: you put money into property and lose liquidity.

With tokenization, property gains “reverse gear”: it becomes an asset that can be moved, used as collateral, and connected to credit much more quickly — at the click of a button. According to him, this will become standard in the coming years, with digital buying and selling and even a “buy” button on property portals, like e-commerce.

Finally, Andreas assures the legal validity of all procedures:

“In Brazil, real estate purchases and sales always happen outside the registry office, in the layer of contractual obligations. The registry office comes later, in the registration layer, which is where property rights are guaranteed.”

For that reason, according to him, tokenization is already legal under the Civil Code, because anyone can negotiate their assets by contract — even “at a bar table.”

“What changed is that, as the market accelerated, registrars began trying to block the link between token and registry record through the ONR and technical notes. Some states have already blocked this, but the market didn’t stop, because tokenization continues happening in the contractual layer.”