K
adena has awarded its first grant from a $50 million ecosystem fund to UK startup CurveBlock, which is building tokenized real estate within the Bank of England's Digital Securities Sandbox. The $400,000 grant marks a significant milestone in the intersection of open blockchain infrastructure and government-led experimentation with digital securities.

    CurveBlock is the first real estate firm accepted into the UK's Digital Securities Sandbox (DSS), a joint initiative between the Bank of England and the Financial Conduct Authority. The DSS allows blockchain-native financial instruments to operate under modified rules, enabling the issuance, trading, and settlement of digital securities with relaxed regulatory constraints.

    Kadena's grant is part of its $50 million program, half of which ($25M) is dedicated to real-world asset (RWA) tokenization. The initiative supports builders working on compliant asset rails, offering equity-free funding, infrastructure support, and code review.

    The DSS launched in late 2024 and represents one of the world's most advanced attempts at enabling digital securities experimentation. Participating firms can scale projects through a series of regulatory gates, with CurveBlock recently clearing Gate 1 with Kadena's support.

    Kadena's Chief Business Officer, Annelise Osborne, believes that infrastructure, not institutional interest, is the bottleneck for RWA adoption. She hopes that this $25 million fund will attract more builders and fintechs to the tokenization side.

    The real estate tokenization market is projected to grow to $19.4 billion by 2033, with recent months seeing a 260% surge in overall RWA market cap to $23 billion. Institutions like Goldman Sachs, HSBC, and BlackRock are actively piloting tokenized securities, suggesting that demand for compliant blockchain rails is no longer hypothetical.

    Kadena's grant to CurveBlock signals that public-chain infrastructure may play a central role in the evolution of tokenized real estate. If successful, this experiment could shape not just the future of tokenized real estate in the UK but also influence US and EU approaches to sandbox-based digital finance.