Asset tokenisation
The issue of digital rights to a real asset — a stake in a business, a warehouse, a batch of metal — where the record of ownership is kept in a distributed ledger rather than in conventional depository or paper-based records.
Asset tokenisation is the conversion of a right to property or a monetary claim into the form of a digital record whose circulation takes place in an information system based on a distributed ledger. The asset itself — real estate, equipment, metal, the revenue of a future period — stays exactly where it was; the only thing that changes is the way of recording who owns it and how that right passes to another holder. Within the Russian legal framework, the result of such an issue is most often a digital financial asset rather than an abstract "token".
How an issue is structured
Tokenisation always has an obligor — the party that acknowledges a debt or an obligation to hand over property. A token without such a party is not a tokenised asset but an entry in a database. The rules for issue, transfer and redemption are written into a smart contract: the program itself checks the conditions and moves the record between accounts, without an instruction that a person submits to a depository. Access to the system, identification of holders and maintenance of the ledger are provided by the information system operator — it plays the role that on the classical market is shared between the exchange, the record-keeping infrastructure and the registrar. For a non-qualified investor there is an annual cap on purchases of digital financial assets with variable income — RUB 600,000.
What stands behind the token
Only something that already has a valuation can be tokenised, and that valuation remains external to the ledger. If the issue is tied to a company's property, the reference point is the book value of its assets — for Norilsk Nickel this is 2 272 000 000 000. The entry in the ledger adds nothing to this figure: it merely records which share of the claim is assigned to whom.
Where the term misleads
Tokenisation is constantly confused with digital currency. These are opposite constructions: a digital currency has no obligor and no underlying property, while a tokenised asset has both. The second substitution is the promise of liquidity. Trading in an information system does not create matching demand: if there are few willing buyers, the digital form of record-keeping does not make exiting a position any faster than selling the warehouse itself. Finally, the issuing platform is not an exchange: secondary circulation is confined to that same system, and on an external crypto exchange such rights, as a rule, do not circulate at all. That is why the mode in which the term loses its meaning is a discussion of the "token" detached from the question of who exactly is obliged under it and what property secures that obligation.