On June 9, 2025, the public chain Kadena made its first funding allocation from its $50 million grant program to support the British start-up Curve Block, which is currently in the digital securities sandbox of the Bank of England.
Kadana has awarded the first grant from its new $50 million ecosystem fund, allocating $400,000 to Curve Block. Curve Block is a British start-up company dedicated to building real estate tokenization projects within the regulated financial sandbox. This milestone marks a crucial intersection between open blockchain infrastructure and government-led digital securities trials, highlighting the growing interest of institutions in compliant tokenization paths for real assets.
Curve Block is the first real estate company to enter the UK Digital Securities Sandbox (DSS), which is a joint initiative of the Bank of England and the Financial Conduct Authority. The digital securities sandbox enables blockchain-native financial instruments to operate under the revised central securities depository and trading rules by 2028, thereby enabling the issuance, trading and settlement of digital securities under relaxed regulatory restrictions.
Kadana’s grant program is the first funding deployment for its newly expanded $50 million project, with half ($25 million) explicitly designated for the tokenization of real assets. This program aims to support builders engaged in tokenized debt, real estate and other compliant asset tracks. Applicants are eligible for equity-free funding, infrastructure support and code review.
The grant received by Curve Block reflects the growing interest in combining public blockchain technology with the needs of real-world institutions. Stuart Popejoy, the CEO of Kadana, said: “Our grant program and token standards are crucial for achieving compliant and scalable tokenization, and we are doubling down on the real-world use cases required by institutions in the ecosystem.”
The Digital Securities Sandbox was launched at the end of 2024 and is one of the most advanced attempts in the world to legally conduct digital securities trials. Participating companies can expand the project through a series of regulatory checkpoints. Curve Block recently passed the first stage with the support of Kadana and will continue to test the actual real estate tokenization process in the coming months.
Annelise Osborne, the chief commercial officer of Kadana and a former executive of Moody’s, believes that the lack of infrastructure rather than institutional interest is the real bottleneck for the adoption of tokenization of real assets. She told the American Bankers Association, “With this $25 million, I really hope we can have more builders and fintech companies from the tokenization field. I firmly believe they will keep growing.” Osborne also pointed out the importance of proof-of-work infrastructure (such as Kadana’s Chainweb) in providing a scalable and secure tokenized track.
Kadana’s approach differs from many of its competitors. It combines a parallelized proof-of-work chain with the upcoming Ethereum virtual machine compatibility and token standards designed for compliance. The broader goal of the grant program is to accelerate the adoption of this infrastructure in real-world applications, especially where on-chain licensing and regulatory control are crucial.
It is predicted that by 2033, the real estate tokenization market alone will grow to 19.4 billion US dollars. In recent months, the total market value of the real asset market has soared by 260% to 23 billion US dollars. Institutions including Goldman Sachs, HSBC and BlackRock are all actively piloting tokenized securities, which indicates that the demand for a compliant blockchain track is no longer a hypothesis.
Kadana’s grant to Curve Block is a notable signal indicating that public chain infrastructure may play a central role in this evolution. If this experiment succeeds, it may not only shape the future of tokenization of real estate in the UK, but also influence the attitudes of the United States and the European Union towards sandbox-based digital finance.
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