Bed Bath & Beyond has entered into an agreement to buy Tokens.com, marking its venture into real estate finance and tokenized real-world assets by fusing traditional financial products with blockchain technology.
According to a company announcement released on Monday, Tokens.com, which focuses on blockchain financial infrastructure, will help create a platform centered on real estate finance, tokenized securities, and other real-world assets (RWAs), thereby bridging blockchain with regulated financial services.
Previously, Bed Bath & Beyond held investments in blockchain companies like tZERO and GrainChain. Tokens.com is set to operate as a wholly owned subsidiary, taking advantage of the existing regulatory and operational frameworks across the retailer’s blockchain ventures.
This upcoming platform aims to consolidate conventional and tokenized assets into a unified interface for users, enabling visibility into ownership, estimated values, and liquidity options, and promoting issuer-led tokenization, asset-backed lending, and cryptocurrency transactions.
Capital market operations such as tokenization, custody, and trading will be facilitated by tZERO, while partnerships with firms like Figure Technologies will offer mortgage and home-equity products.
Users employing this platform for financing can choose to receive funds in cash or cryptocurrencies, including stablecoins, with the aim for the platform to be operational by mid-2026, pending closure conditions.
Bed Bath & Beyond filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in April 2023 after struggling with declining sales and started to liquidate its retail operations in the U.S. Following the bankruptcy, Overstock acquired the Bed Bath & Beyond brand name and intellectual property in a 2023 bankruptcy auction.
Subsequently, Overstock rebranded itself as Beyond Inc. and relaunched Bed Bath & Beyond focusing on an online retail model, per Reuters.
Companies Expand into Tokenized Assets
Bed Bath & Beyond’s move into the realm of tokenized RWAs, utilizing blockchain for representing conventional assets, coincides with a trend where numerous companies and financial platforms are integrating on-chain financial structures.
In October, Telegram transitioned into tokenized stocks by offering users access to approximately 60 tokenized U.S. stocks through collaborations with Backed and Kraken.
ETHZilla (ETHZ), which transformed from a biotech company into an Ethereum treasury firm, also progressed into tokenized asset creation through a series of on-chain credit agreements.
In December, the firm secured a 20% stake in Karus with a $10 million deal to issue AI-based tokenized auto-loan portfolios, and acquired a 15% stake in digital lender Zippy to elevate on-chain home loans.
Moreover, on December 10, Mubadala Capital, the asset management sector of Abu Dhabi’s sovereign fund, announced it’s collaborating with Kaio to investigate integrating its private-market investment strategies on-chain.
Research from RWA.xyz indicates that the tokenized real-world asset market has surged to around $24.2 billion in distributed value, an almost 300% increase from $6.1 billion recorded on February 3 of the previous year.
