Cardone Bets $5 Billion on Real Estate Tokenization

Grant Cardone plans to tokenize Cardone Capital’s $5B real estate portfolio on blockchain, chasing liquidity and market dominance in a fast-moving space.

Grant Cardone is making a move that few real estate moguls have dared to try at this scale. Cardone Capital, his multi-family and commercial property firm, is preparing to tokenize its entire portfolio. That’s five billion dollars worth of real estate heading to the blockchain.

As CoinDesk reported, Cardone shared the plan on X, saying the firm wants to hand investors “collateral and liquidity in the secondary markets.” He went further, saying Cardone Capital aims to become a market leader in tokenizing assets at scale. That is a bold claim in a space that is still figuring out its own rules.

This is not Cardone’s first step into digital assets. His firm bought 1,000 BTC in June and has been clear about plans to keep adding bitcoin to its balance sheet. Before that, CoinDesk had already flagged that Cardone Capital was looking to use real estate cash flow to fund its bitcoin buys. The tokenization plan sits right on top of that strategy.

Big Names Are Circling the Same Idea

Cardone is not alone in this. Not even close. The Trump Organization is tokenizing loan revenue tied to a resort project in the Maldives. Barry Sternlicht’s Starwood Capital, which manages over $125 billion, has said it is ready to tokenize but keeps running into U.S. regulatory walls. These are not small players testing the water.

According to CoinDesk on X, the case for tokenizing real estate rests on what blockchain does well: cleaner ownership records, faster trading, and quicker settlement. But a report from EY pointed to the same problems that keep coming up. Regulation is patchy across markets, and secondary trading volumes are still too thin to guarantee real liquidity for token holders.

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Deloitte’s numbers tell the long-term story. Its forecast puts tokenized real estate at $4 trillion by 2035. That is 27% annual growth from here. The market today is a fraction of that, which is exactly why firms like Cardone Capital want to get in now.

Liquidity Promise Meets Regulatory Reality

The tokenized real estate sector is growing fast on paper. Getting there in practice is a different matter. Regulatory inconsistency across U.S. states and between the U.S. and international markets keeps slowing actual deployment. Cardone has not said which blockchain his firm will use or when tokens will be available to investors.

The promise Cardone made on X, giving investors collateral and access to secondary markets, is what makes this different from just owning property shares in a fund. Tokenized assets can theoretically trade around the clock. That is the pitch, anyway.

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What happens between announcement and working product is where most of these deals get complicated. Starwood has been ready to move for a while. It still hasn’t. The Trump Organization’s Maldives project is live but narrow in scope. Cardone Capital managing $5B in tokenized property at scale would be a different order of magnitude entirely.

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The firm manages multi-family and commercial properties spread across the U.S. Turning those assets into blockchain tokens, ones that trade with real liquidity, is the part no one has fully cracked yet. Cardone says his firm plans to lead that charge. The market will decide if the infrastructure is ready.