Tokenizing a real-world asset is not one decision. It is roughly a dozen, made in a particular order, and some of them cannot be taken back once made. This page walks through all of them in plain language: what you are being asked, why it is being asked, what each answer commits you to, and at what point the door closes behind you.
No prior knowledge of securities law or blockchains is assumed.
The first half is about your company — proving who you are and clearing sanctions and ownership checks. You do it once. The second half is about each asset you want to tokenize — and you repeat it for every building, fund, or loan you bring to the platform. Some stages are yours to decide; others are the platform's, an attorney's, or the blockchain's.
Scroll the diagram sideways
Before you can tokenize anything, the platform has to know exactly who is issuing it. This stage has few real choices and a lot of disclosure — but the one choice you do make here, your legal entity type, quietly shapes everything downstream.
Pick the entity that actually appears on your formation documents. This is not a cosmetic label: it determines who has authority to sign, who must be disclosed as an owner, how the tax paperwork flows to your investors, and which offering structures (Stage 4) are even available to you.
Standard business verification — the same information a bank would ask for before opening a commercial account. Every field here feeds an automated check in Stage 2.
| What's asked | Required | In plain terms |
|---|---|---|
legal_name | Required | Exactly as registered with the state — not your trading name or brand. |
ein | Required | Your federal tax ID. This is what identity verification is run against. |
formation_state & formation_date | Required | Where and when the entity came into existence. Delaware, Wyoming and Texas are common; the state itself is not a problem, but it is recorded. |
| Registered address | Required | Street, city, state, postal code, country. The country drives the jurisdiction check — some countries are simply not eligible. |
phone_number, website | Optional | Contact points. A live website meaningfully speeds up human review. |
lei | Optional | A 20-character Legal Entity Identifier — a global passport number for companies, issued through GLEIF. If you have one, it is written into the token itself, so anyone inspecting the asset on-chain can independently identify the issuer. Checked here for correct shape and checksum. |
You list every beneficial owner — broadly, any individual holding 25% or more, plus at least one person who exercises real control. This is not an Ioniqx preference. It is the US Treasury's Customer Due Diligence rule, and an incomplete answer here fails an automated gate before a human ever sees your file.
You are not making choices here — the platform is. It is worth understanding anyway, because knowing what is being tested tells you what to get right the first time. Submission runs five checks in parallel, then an AI reads the results, then a securities attorney makes the actual decision.
All five run at once, with no human involved. A disqualifying hit ends the process immediately — nobody spends a week reviewing a sanctioned entity.
Is this a real, registered business, and do the documents match what you told us?
Does the company or any owner appear on the US Treasury's OFAC list of blocked persons?
The same question against United Nations and European Union sanctions lists.
Is the country you operate from one the platform can lawfully serve?
Have all 25%-and-above owners actually been disclosed, as the FinCEN rule requires?
Scroll the diagram sideways
The rules the AI applies are written and version-controlled by attorneys, not by engineers. When guidance changes, counsel publishes a new version of the ruleset, and every review permanently records which version was applied to it. The AI's job is to apply those rules consistently and explain every flag it raises. The decision itself — approve, ask for more, reject — is always a licensed human's, and it is recorded with a cryptographic fingerprint of who decided what, about whom, and when. Years later, that record can be reconstructed and verified for an SEC examination.
In the US, selling an investment to the public normally means registering it with the SEC — a slow, expensive process. Almost nobody tokenizing a building does that. Instead you use an exemption: a pre-approved rulebook that lets you raise money without full registration, in exchange for accepting limits on who can invest, how much you can raise, and how you are allowed to talk about it.
A private placement, sold mainly to wealthy or institutional investors. No cap on how much you raise.
A scaled-down public offering. Anyone can invest, but you must file with the SEC and be qualified before you sell.
Small raises through a registered funding portal, open to the general public.
Sold only to people outside the United States. Often run alongside a Reg D offering as a second tranche.
This is the single most consequential choice on the platform, and it comes down to one trade: may you advertise, and how hard must you work to prove your investors are wealthy? You cannot have both the freedom and the light touch. The platform requires you to declare which one you are using when the offering is created, and the answer flows all the way down into the token's transfer rules.
You may not advertise or publicly solicit. You raise from people you already have a relationship with.
You may advertise the offering to the world — in exchange for verifying every single investor.
If a Reg D offering somehow reaches the platform without declaring which sub-rule it uses, the system does not assume the permissive one. It applies the stricter 506(c) floor until a human declares otherwise. A missing field can never be the reason an unverified investor gets in.
"Accredited investor" has several legal definitions, and you may accept all of them or narrow the list. Leaving it blank means you accept every basis — an issuer with no particular view is not forced to pick one.
Everyone assumes this question has an obvious answer. It does not. There are exactly two coherent ways to answer it, and they produce different tax forms, different redemption mechanics, and different transfer restrictions burned into the token. You choose one, once, for the whole offering — never per investor, never per tranche.
Scroll the diagram sideways
Maximum transparency. The holder is genuinely a co-owner of the entity that owns the property.
Maximum tradability. A purpose-built company holds the interest and issues claims against itself.
Redemption terms have to be decided and disclosed before anyone invests — not discovered at the moment someone asks to exit. Four settings, and the combination is your liquidity promise.
How often the books close and a redemption window opens.
How far ahead an investor must tell you they want out, and the earliest date anyone may ask. Together these give you time to raise cash without a fire sale.
Where the exit price comes from. The method is disclosed; the resulting number is never published on the blockchain.
Who actually pays a redeeming investor.
If you choose gated, that must be disclosed up front. It is a real limit on liquidity, and investors are entitled to know before they commit.
A token that says nothing about what it represents is just a number in a database. These attributes are written permanently into the token when it is created, in a standard vocabulary, so that a wallet, an exchange, an auditor or a regulator can read what the asset is without asking you.
These are deliberately two separate questions, because the answers are independent. A senior loan secured on an apartment block and an equity stake in the same block are both real estate — but they have opposite risk profiles. One question cannot be inferred from the other, so both are required.
A fixed list. Adding to it requires a change to the published standard, so these values mean the same thing everywhere.
Also a fixed list. This is the line between "I own a slice of the upside" and "I am owed a fixed amount before anyone else gets paid".
| Attribute | Required | In plain terms |
|---|---|---|
token_symbol |
Optional | The short ticker holders will see in their wallet. |
rwa.subclass |
Optional | A finer description within the class — for real estate: multifamily, industrial, office, retail, hospitality, self-storage, data-center, senior-housing, single-family-rental, land, mixed-use, specialty. Unlike the two axes above, this list is open and grows over time. |
rwa.jurisdiction |
Optional | Whose law governs the asset. Useful to anyone assessing it from another country. |
rwa.issuer_lei |
Inherited | Carried automatically from your company record, if you supplied one in Stage 1. Lets anyone verify the issuer against a global registry. |
| Property reference | Optional | Which specific parcel this is — a county tax-assessor number, a UK address identifier, a French cadastral reference, and so on. It is never published in the clear. The identifier is combined with a secret random value unique to your project and converted into a one-way fingerprint. That lets you prove later which building this token referred to, without publishing the address on a permanent public ledger for anyone to scrape. |
rwa.api |
Automatic | A web address, written into the token, where anyone can fetch the full asset record. The token carries a pointer, not a brochure. |
Ordinary offering economics — but the platform checks them against each other before anything is approved, so an internally contradictory offering never reaches an investor.
If a 506(c) offering sets its minimum at $200,000 for individuals or $1,000,000 for entities, SEC staff guidance allows the accreditation representations to be collected as a digital attestation carried in the token itself, rather than on paper. The size of the cheque is doing part of the verification work. Whether your offering qualifies is a question for your counsel — but if it does, the entire subscription flow can run inside the token.
This is the part people most often misunderstand, so it is worth being blunt about it. Decisions on this platform are freely editable right up until a specific moment, and then they are not editable at all — ever. Knowing where those moments sit tells you when to stop deliberating and when to get it right.
Exemption, sub-rule, ownership structure, redemption terms, token attributes, financial terms — change any of it as often as you like. Nothing has been promised to anyone and nothing has been written to a blockchain. This is the cheap phase. Use it.
Direct member or SPV wrapper, the tax form holders receive, the meaning of redemption, whether transfer caps apply: all of it is fixed from here. The approval cannot be withdrawn either. The reason is simple — from this point investors subscribe on the basis of that legal shape, and an offering whose shape can be revised afterwards has told its investors something that later stopped being true.
Asset class and claim type must both be filled in from the approved vocabularies. The storage space for this description is allocated on the blockchain at the moment the token is created and cannot be enlarged afterwards, so an incomplete description blocks minting rather than producing a half-labelled token.
A token cannot be un-minted. Its classification, its issuer identifier, its property fingerprint and the rule branch its transfer restrictions follow are now part of a public, permanent record. A token configured for one ownership model cannot later be re-pointed at the other, because the two describe genuinely different taxable events. If something is wrong at this point, the remedy is a new offering — not an edit.
Your offering goes through its own review — narrower than the company review, because the company has already been cleared. Then the token is created, and from that moment the rules you chose stop being policy and start being physics.
Four automated checks, then AI scoring, then an attorney.
Is the sponsoring company still approved and in good standing today — not just on the day it was onboarded?
Are the offering documents an investor would need actually attached?
Do the numbers hold together — minimum inside the target, values positive and sane?
Does the offering open before it closes, and is the schedule coherent?
The structure is frozen, the offering can be activated, and the token can be minted.
Something needs fixing. You are still in the cheap phase — edit freely and resubmit.
With written reasons, recorded in the same audit ledger as every other decision.
This is the payoff. When someone tries to move a token, the transfer is intercepted before it settles and tested against the rules your decisions produced. A transfer that fails does not get flagged for later review — it simply does not happen.
Scroll the diagram sideways
You make roughly a dozen decisions. Three of them — your exemption, 506(b) versus 506(c), and direct member versus SPV wrapper — determine most of the others. Everything downstream is either derived from those three automatically, or checked against them before it can be saved.
The remaining work is disclosure, documents, and dates. The platform's job is to make sure that by the time a token exists, none of your answers contradict each other — and that the rules you chose are enforced by the network rather than by anyone's good intentions.
This page describes how the Ioniqx platform structures these decisions, in deliberately simplified language. It is general information only and is not legal, tax or investment advice. Securities exemptions, accreditation standards, partnership tax treatment and transfer restrictions all turn on the specific facts of a given offering, and thresholds change over time. Every offering on the platform is reviewed by a securities attorney — and you should have your own counsel involved before you commit to any of the paths described here.
Dollar thresholds and rule references reflect US federal securities regulations as currently understood and are provided for orientation. Whether any particular offering qualifies for any particular exemption is a facts-and-circumstances determination for the issuer and its counsel.
We will map your entity, your exemption and your structure onto the platform with you, and show you exactly where the irreversible moments sit for your offering.