I’ve spent the last six years tokenizing things. A national currency. Bitcoin hashrate derivatives. Protected forest areas. European stablecoins. Mining infrastructure. Along the way, I’ve learned that the hardest part of tokenization is never the smart contract — it’s everything around it.

The RWA (Real-World Asset) tokenization market is attracting enormous attention, and rightly so. But after shipping multiple tokenization projects across very different regulatory environments, I want to share some practical lessons that don’t get discussed enough in the conference panels and Twitter threads.

BRZ: Tokenizing a Currency Before the Playbook Existed

When we launched the BRZ stablecoin at Transfero Group in early 2019, there was no framework for what we were doing. No MiCA. No clear regulatory guidance for stablecoins in Brazil. We deployed on Ethereum because it was the only viable option at the time — and we did it knowing from day one that we would need to be multi-chain, even though the multi-chain world as we know it today barely existed.

The token itself was the easy part. An ERC-20, fiat-collateralized 1:1 with the Brazilian Real, each token backed by reserves held at a Central Bank of Brazil–authorized institution. The architecture of the smart contract — minting, burning, role-based access controls — was straightforward Solidity.

What was not straightforward was everything else.

We had to build the entire operational model from scratch: how do you reconcile on-chain token supply with off-chain fiat reserves in real time? How do you handle redemption when your banking partners operate on Brazilian business hours but the blockchain never sleeps? How do you integrate with exchanges that each have their own API standards, listing requirements, and compliance expectations?

As the multi-chain landscape expanded, we deployed on Algorand, Solana (very early on), and eventually 16+ chains. Each deployment was its own mini-project: new foundation relationship, new technical integration, new gas/fee optimization, new exchange listings. We built a repeatable playbook, but every chain had its own surprises.

Beyond the token, we built a quantitative trading platform that supported 69 market-making algorithms and 24 investment strategies — which eventually powered Transfero’s fund. Compliance was a constant concern, and we addressed it through a combination of exchange partnerships and a redemption process operated through regulated partners in Brazil.

The lesson from BRZ: tokenizing a real-world asset at scale is primarily an operations and compliance challenge, not a technology challenge. The smart contract is maybe 10% of the work. The other 90% is custody, reconciliation, banking integration, regulatory alignment, and the operational discipline to keep all of it running reliably.

Alkimiya: When Compliance Isn’t the Blocker (Yet)

After Transfero, I co-founded Anicca Research and the Alkimiya Protocol — a fully on-chain, decentralized platform for hashrate derivatives. The idea was ambitious: create capital markets for blockspace, allowing miners and validators to hedge their cash flows through bilateral smart contracts on Ethereum.

We chose Ethereum for its liquidity and trader base, but the core product’s underlying asset was Bitcoin’s reward and hashrate. This created an interesting architectural tension: the product lived on Ethereum, but its value was derived from Bitcoin’s mining economy. We designed the system around federated oracles pulling data from mining pools, with positions represented as ERC-1155 NFTs and settlement happening through temporary tokens we called Silica.

The project was a massive learning experience. We raised $7.2M from 1kx, Dragonfly, Coinbase Ventures, Circle Ventures, and others, and eventually launched on Ethereum mainnet and Base L2.

One thing that made Alkimiya fundamentally different from BRZ: at that point in the market’s evolution, compliance was not a blocking constraint for DeFi protocols. We could focus almost entirely on product design and market mechanics without navigating the regulatory maze that dominated the stablecoin world.

That window is closing. As regulation catches up to DeFi — and it will — the lessons from building compliant tokenized assets (like BRZ) will become increasingly relevant even for protocols that started in the permissionless world.

Preservaland: Tokenizing What You Can’t Touch

Preservaland took tokenization in a completely different direction: we tokenized preserved forest areas in Brazil as NFTs on Ethereum and Polygon. Each token carries an NFT and serves as ecological compensation — companies and individuals can offset their environmental impact by acquiring tokens linked to protected areas.

These forest areas, by law, cannot be commercially exploited. But through our system, they can be monetized for conservation purposes. The “real asset” backing the token isn’t a financial instrument — it’s a physical piece of the Amazon or the Serra da Bocaina.

The secret was in the backend: satellite monitoring integrated with government registries (SICAR and Global Forest Watch) to verify that the forest areas are real, protected, and intact. The blockchain provides the ownership and trading layer, but the trust comes from the off-chain verification infrastructure.

This project reinforced a key principle: in RWA tokenization, the token is only as credible as the link to the real-world asset it represents. If your verification mechanism is weak, your token is worthless regardless of how elegant your smart contract is.

EURQ with Quantoz: Multi-Chain Done Right with LayerZero

More recently, I worked with Quantoz on the EURQ stablecoin — a euro-pegged token that needed to be multi-chain from the start. They chose LayerZero as the cross-chain infrastructure, which introduced some interesting technical challenges.

Even though we started with a standard ERC-20, deploying through LayerZero required modifying the token contract, redeploying, and building the infrastructure to support LayerZero’s mint-and-burn scheme. This was different from the lock-and-mint approach we initially considered — and the choice mattered, because mint-and-burn fully complied with the regulatory framework while maintaining clean token supply accounting across chains.

We also operated as one of the two DVNs (Decentralized Verifier Networks) required in LayerZero’s initial configuration for transaction approval. The project moved fast, but not without scrutiny — we went through a full audit, which we passed.

The EURQ experience showed how much the multi-chain deployment landscape has matured since the early BRZ days. But it also showed that even with better infrastructure, the regulatory and operational details still require careful, hands-on attention.

CS Digital: When Tokenization Doesn’t Make Sense

Not every tokenization idea should be tokenized.

When we founded CS Digital, a Bitcoin mining company, we initially explored selling mining-as-a-service as a tokenized product — make hashrate accessible globally through tokens. Given my experience from Alkimiya, we knew the market interest was there.

But when we consulted with lawyers, the answer was clear: a broadly available, globally distributed tokenized mining product would almost certainly run afoul of securities regulations in multiple jurisdictions. The product itself was viable; the regulatory path to tokenize it was not.

We didn’t do it.

This is a lesson I think the RWA space needs to hear more often: just because you can tokenize something doesn’t mean you should. The technology is permissionless; the law is not.

The Fund That Stayed Traditional

Recently, a company approached me to help tokenize an investment fund. After significant analysis, we reached a conclusion that surprised them: the most sensible path was to set up the fund as a traditionally regulated vehicle and only tokenize the fund shares (the cotas).

The temptation was to build the entire fund on-chain — an indexed fund, fully transparent, fully composable. It sounds beautiful on a pitch deck. But in practice, it carries regulatory challenges that, if not perfectly aligned across jurisdictions, can render the entire structure illegal.

An on-chain fund that operates outside the regulatory perimeter isn’t innovative — it’s non-compliant. And non-compliance doesn’t scale.

The hybrid approach — traditional fund structure with tokenized shares — gives you the benefits of blockchain (fractional ownership, programmable distribution, global transferability) without breaking the regulatory framework. It’s less exciting on stage. It’s much more likely to survive contact with a regulator.

What’s Changed: AI, Tooling, and the Cost of Building

One thing that has changed dramatically since we built BRZ and Alkimiya is the development and auditing toolchain.

Back then, we spent significant money on smart contract audits — and the process was slow. Today, tools like Foundry (Forge) for EVM contract development and AI-assisted coding tools like Claude Code have compressed development cycles enormously. You can write, test, fuzz, and pre-audit contracts faster than ever before.

This doesn’t eliminate the need for formal audits — it accelerates everything around them. You catch more issues earlier. You iterate faster. You arrive at the audit with cleaner code.

For anyone building tokenization infrastructure today, the tooling advantage compared to even three years ago is massive. Use it.

The Real Lesson: Regulation Is the Product

After six years and multiple tokenization projects across different asset classes, jurisdictions, and regulatory environments, the pattern is clear:

The biggest risk in RWA tokenization is not technical — it’s regulatory.

The technology works. Solidity is mature. Multi-chain infrastructure (LayerZero, Wormhole, native bridges) is production-ready. Custody solutions exist. Oracles are reliable. AI-assisted development tools make building faster and cheaper than ever.

What hasn’t been solved is the global regulatory patchwork. MiCA is a start in Europe. Brazil has its own framework evolving. The US remains fragmented. Asia varies country by country.

The best tokenization projects I’ve been part of share a common trait: they pushed regulatory boundaries just enough to prove what’s possible, but never so far that they broke the law. They worked with the regulatory framework, not around it.

Tokenizing real-world assets is a massive opportunity. But the teams that will win are not the ones with the cleverest smart contracts — they’re the ones that understand how to build compliant operational models that bridge the on-chain and off-chain worlds.

I know, because I’ve been building those bridges since 2018.

Roberto Santacroce Martins is a blockchain architect and technology executive based in Madrid. He designed the BRZ stablecoin (largest non-dollar stablecoin globally), co-founded the Alkimiya Protocol ($7.2M raised), and currently operates Santacroce Tech. He has been building in the crypto space since 2011.