Foreword

I spent twenty-five years in real estate. Over that career I completed more than thirteen hundred transactions: new-build developments, chalets clinging to Alpine slopes, investment committees where yield, rental vacancy and liquidity were discussed with the gravity that mountain people reserve for the weather forecast. Then, between 2017 and 2018, almost by accident, I saw that a building could be recorded in a ledger kept by thousands of computers at once, that a fraction of its rents could pass from one investor to another on a Sunday evening, and that this fraction still remained attached to walls, to a lease, to a flesh-and-blood tenant. That evening I understood that my profession was about to change its grammar, and that everything I had known about how it worked would never be quite the same again.

Today we call Real World Assets, or RWA, those assets from the physical world whose ownership, or a right attached to them, is represented by a digital token recorded on a blockchain. A government bond, a share in a money market fund, a loan to a small business, a gold bar, an office building, a trade receivable. The object stays the same. The way it exists in the ledgers, the way it circulates and settles, changes profoundly.

So why a « bible »?

Knowledge about RWA is scattered. It sleeps in white papers, most of them written in English to this day, in investment bank reports with dizzying forecasts, in social media threads, in sales presentations that readily confuse the promise with the result. A reader who wants to understand this market from end to end has to assemble a puzzle without knowing its shape. I wanted to give that reader the complete picture.