Inherently Global

My AFF 2026 speech on Skyline Standard and CRE tokenization

Tokenization is inherently global, that’s one of the most exciting things about it.

Now that NYSE has followed Nasdaq’s lead in tokenizing stocks, there is an inevitability to this whole thing. It’s coming. And while the US exchanges are talking about 24/7 trading and fractional shares, the bigger gains are still to come. To me, that means illiquid asset classes, and solving cross-border settlement. Like I said, it’s inherently global.

So we are building Skyline Standard for that end state. We are building for the global, liquid CRE market that we want to see. A market driven by price discovery, and by capital flows that aren’t held up by red tape. A market that can seamlessly connect capital with real estate projects around the world.

I had an opportunity to come to the Asian Financial Forum in Hong Kong to talk about Skyline Standard, and to meet with business leaders from across Asia to figure out how Skyline can help their tokenization efforts take off, and how we can enable institutional adoption of their tokenization projects and marketplaces.

I wrote the following speech for a presentation to the AFF 2026 Project Investment Session on Financial Technology, and I wanted to share it here as well, because I haven’t really talked about cross border real estate deals on here, and because this project is inherently global.

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I’m thrilled to talk to you about my company Skyline Standard, but all morning I’ve been thinking about my last company instead.

That company, Armada, was a real estate focused asset manager. We launched two active REIT ETFs in the US. And like I said, I was walking over here to the conference this morning I was thinking about it. I was looking out at Victoria Harbour. It is one of the most magnificent skylines in the entire world.

And I’m looking out at the skyline of Hong Kong and the skyline of Kowloon, and I’m looking at the magnificent buildings. We all know about the Hong Kong real estate market. The wild swings, the ups and downs, the growth, the opportunity.

So I’m thinking about that company, because guess how much of the Hong Kong skyline our ETFs invested in? None of it. No investments in Hong Kong, none in mainland China, none in Japan, none in Seoul, none in Singapore.

This wasn’t for lack of interest. It was just too impractical. We had to contend with US SEC liquidity rules, NAV calculation issues, questions about custody, tax opinions on both sides of the Pacific, disclosure burdens, settlement friction, currency hedging, regulatory asymmetry, and on and on.

The due diligence process would have made it cost and time prohibitive before we even got to the transaction part.

At the same time, we have US-listed stocks and ETFs cross-listed right here on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. We have ADRs trading in the US. We have a stock market infrastructure that allows me to buy US stocks from Hong Kong, and Hong Kong stocks from the US, in milliseconds.

Not only is the trading of stocks remarkably fast and accessible, it is cheap, and it is efficient. As an example, I can not pay more than the lowest global offer for any stock at any given time. That’s been built into the market structure fabric across the globe. Think about how miraculous that is.

That spread, that difference between the efficiency of transacting stocks versus the impracticality of transacting cross-border real estate, that is our opportunity. That is what Skyline Standard is solving.

As luck would have it, the technology exists to solve this exact problem. That technology is called tokenized trading, or Real World Asset trading. It works. It solves the cross-border problem, and it can do so at speed and scale.

Not only does it solve these problems, it goes beyond. Since the tokens are digital and programmable, you can be as creative with them as you want. That means that you can separate dividends from asset accumulation. You can slice and dice a portfolio by geography, or property class, or any other way you can imagine. You can automate escrow and taxes, or strip out proxy voting. You can build waterfall payouts into the token. And on and on.

The only limit on customization is your own creativity.

So if it works, why do so few people know about it?

When you talk to institutional buyers and sellers of CRE, they tell you: they don’t trust tokenization. Not yet.

And why should they? When you buy stocks you know that exchanges and regulators and auditors have forced companies to disclose their financials and all relevant information. When you trade bonds, it is the rating agencies who serve that purpose.

And when you trade commercial real estate? Nothing. You are on your own. It’s a manual due diligence process. A manual process, and it takes time, it costs money, and it doesn’t scale.

We believe that trust solves liquidity. Just like it has in every liquid asset class. Skyline Standard is solving trust by putting the critical infrastructure for trust into tokenized real estate.

Skyline provides proofs of every vital data point on the property level, and hashes those verifications to the blockchain. It’s public, transparent, accessible, and efficient.

It allows due diligence to be done in minutes instead of months. It allows deals to be completed from your phone. And it brings a level of data, analytics and trust to the largest market on the planet.

Trust solves liquidity.

Skyline Standard solves trust.

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