“You know how the clearinghouses work. To be honest, we are basically making them obsolete with our knowledge,” said Ivo Grigorov, CEO of REAL Technologies, on the On The Margin podcast.
REAL Technologies, the parent of REAL Finance, has executed its first securities tokenization agreement with Factori AD, a fully licensed EU-regulated investment broker. The deal activates a committed pipeline above $100 million in client assets, the company said in a statement Wednesday.
The opening trade is small. It involves 5,000,000 warrants tied to Alpha Bulgaria AD, a publicly traded investment company on the Bulgarian Stock Exchange under the ticker ALFB. The warrants trade at roughly €2.75 each, putting notional value around €13.75 million. They will be tokenized on an EVM-compatible blockchain ahead of REAL’s planned Layer 1 mainnet.
Factori AD keeps the regulated stack: client onboarding, KYC, AML, licensed OTC execution and segregated custody. REAL provides the tokenization and settlement layer. International securities custody runs through Bank of New York. Bulgarian securities sit at the Central Depository in Bulgaria.
“We see growing institutional demand for regulated tokenization infrastructure that can bridge traditional securities markets with blockchain-based settlement systems,” said Dimitar Tsvetanov, Managing Director at Factori AD, in the announcement. “Through this agreement with REAL Finance, we are able to provide clients with a compliant framework for bringing real financial instruments on-chain while maintaining regulated execution, custody, and onboarding standards.”
Grigorov, a former European Central Bank staffer who later worked across regional central banking and a private fund with more than 1.5 billion euros in assets, said the team’s traditional-finance pedigree is the point.
“I worked for the European Central Bank. I worked for the regional central bank. Then a couple of private banks, a private fund with more than 1.5 billion in assets,” he said.
His pitch is that most of what already calls itself tokenization does not work as actual market infrastructure.
“A lot of companies are tokenizing different assets. However, those assets are missing key quality. They’re missing leverage opportunities. They’re missing out of this overall wholesome ecosystem,” Grigorov said on the podcast.
He predicted that more than 30% of overall financial instruments trading would move on-chain inside five years.
“You don’t need a BlackRock to back you up in order to be successful,” he said. “There’s thousands of different financial institutions, banks, etc. who are actually turning over billions on a daily range.”
The wider on-chain race
“The next step going forward will be tokenization of financial assets, and that means every stock, every bond… will be on one general ledger,” BlackRock CEO Larry Fink told CNBC in January 2024.
BlackRock launched its tokenized treasury fund, BUIDL, two months later on Ethereum via Securitize. The fund holds cash, US Treasury bills and repurchase agreements. It now sits above $2 billion in assets across multiple chains, per data from rwa.xyz. Franklin Templeton, Ondo Finance and WisdomTree run rival products.
JPMorgan rebranded its blockchain unit Onyx to Kinexys in November 2024. The platform handles tokenized intraday repo, cross-border payments and collateral mobility, with cumulative volumes the bank has said run into the trillions.
Boston Consulting Group and HSBC, in a joint report, put the tokenized real-world asset market at roughly $16 trillion by 2030.
Europe’s regulatory window
Two EU frameworks give Grigorov a foothold.
The Markets in Crypto-Assets regulation, known as MiCA, became fully applicable on December 30, 2024. The separate DLT Pilot Regime, in force since March 2023, lets licensed venues run distributed-ledger-based trading and settlement for tokenized securities within defined limits.
Bulgaria, where Factori AD is licensed, sits inside both.
“We are probably one of the only players based out of the European Union,” Grigorov said. “The European Union has been kind of like the slow kids on the block for quite some time when it comes to fintech. But whatever, it’s still basically the second biggest economy worldwide. There’s still financial gaps across the space. We have good contacts here, and we’re planning to introduce instruments which are not available elsewhere.”
Pipeline, $500 million claimed
The Alpha Bulgaria warrants are the first of a much larger book Grigorov says is already signed.
“This is the first of many, to be honest. We have also, you know, we’re planning more than 500 million in the pipeline of such kind of tradable assets, together with partners who are actually licensed brokerages, licensed financial institutions, licensed even banks,” he said on the podcast.
Two of those partners are banks, he added, one in the European Union and one in the Middle East.
REAL Finance is backed by Wiener Privatbank. Its native token, ASET, trades on Kraken, KuCoin and OKX, Grigorov said.
Valentin Dimitrov, REAL’s chief operating officer, said the architecture was designed for the same audience the Tsvetanov quote describes. “We designed the architecture around licensed custody, full compliance, and genuine instruments,” he said. “This first executed deal, together with the committed flow, confirms institutional demand for the infrastructure we are building.”
The Bulgarian warrant pilot has to clear before any of the $100 million pipeline behind it draws down. Grigorov said he is not waiting on Wall Street to certify the model.
“You don’t need a BlackRock,” he said.