Chrysler Building Owner Sells Stake in Zurich Property for ERC-20 Tokens and Cash

The new owner of the Chrysler Building is selling a property worth $135 million to a blockchain real-estate company, taking a fifth of the purchase price in tokenized securities.

New York-based RFR Holdings, which purchased the Chrysler Building in a joint agreement in March 2019, agreed to sell its majority stake in a commercial property in Zurich to BrickMark, a Switzerland-based real estate agency.

According to BrickMark CEO Stephan Rind, it is the largest-ever real estate deal involving digital tokens.

BrickMark's ethereum-based tokens are hybrid digital securities - tokenized perpetual bonds that will be backed by property in the BrickMark portfolio.

Under the deal, RFR will lead redevelopment plans to expand the Zurich property's rentable space sixfold, increasing annual revenue and the value of the token.

More tokens will be issued in line with new real estate acquisitions, enabling more investors to participate without diluting those held by existing holders.

Although restricted for the time being to qualified investors, there are plans under evaluation that would allow BrickMark to offer BMT tokens to retail investors through a European-regulated security token offering.

"We think digital securities and tokens are able to unlock these tremendous values and also give people, on a worldwide basis, access to properties that have [to now] been privileged."

Another real estate startup, known as AssetBlock, launched a commercial property trading platform on the Algorand blockchain in September.

Discussing the Bahnhofstrasse deal, Dr Alexander Koblischek, managing director of RFR Germany, said: "We gladly accepted the Brickmark tokens as part of the purchase price. We assume that digital financial instruments will also significantly gain in importance in the real estate sector in the future."