New Jersey County Kicks Off $240B Real Estate Tokenization — The Industry May Never Look the Same
New Jersey just fired the starting gun on what might be the biggest blockchain moment for U.S. real estate — and barely anyone in crypto is talking about it.
Bergen County, one of the wealthiest and most populous areas in the state, is moving all 370,000 of its property deeds — representing a jaw-dropping $240 billion in value — onto blockchain. Yes, all of them. That’s every home, apartment, and commercial lot across 70 municipalities, now being digitally preserved and tokenized.
This is a full-on operational overhaul of how public real estate records are handled in the real world — with blockchain taking center stage.
From files to tokens
Traditionally, buying a house meant wrestling with paperwork, waiting days or weeks for record updates, and relying on government databases that haven’t changed much since the early 2000s
“This initiative is about improving the lives of our residents,” said John Hogan, County Clerk of Bergen, in the official announcement. “By digitizing property records, we’re making the process simpler, faster, and more secure for homeowners, businesses, and future generations.”
More than just a government experiment
This isn’t just about going paperless. It’s about plugging real estate — the world’s largest asset class — into the 24/7 programmable economy. Deeds become tokens. Ownership becomes code. And with that, a market that was closed off to most of the world starts to open up.
If that sounds dramatic, it is. According to a joint report by Boston Consulting Group and Ripple, the tokenized assets market could hit $18.9 trillion by 2033 — and real estate is expected to take a fat share of that pie.
Here’s why this matters: up until now, a lot of real-world asset (RWA) tokenization was hypothetical. The big headlines — BlackRock, JPMorgan, Citi — mostly covered bonds and funds. But this is concrete. Real homes. Real land. Real government offices moving the backbone of American property rights onto digital rails.
And while the rest of the crypto world was arguing over memecoins, this quietly became the biggest public RWA use case in the U.S.
The little detail no one is paying attention to
This isn’t Bergen’s first blockchain rodeo. The county partnered with a land records startup that has been building similar systems in other parts of New Jersey. One of those earlier pilots uncovered nearly $1 million in lost municipal revenue — money that had slipped through the cracks because of outdated, messy property records.
Fixing that kind of problem is where tokenization shines, real-time auditability, instant traceability, and no more digging through filing cabinets or outdated PDFs.
And it’s not just about efficiency. It’s also about inclusion. A digitized deed system is a foundation. On top of that, you can build fractional ownership, global marketplaces, inheritance tools, and even real-time tax calculations.
Tokenization isn’t the end. It’s the infrastructure layer that lets innovation finally show up in one of the world’s oldest industries.
What this means for tokenization’s breakout moment
So, where does this leave the rest of the crypto world?
It’s simple: the tokenization movement just got its U.S. breakthrough moment — and it didn’t come from Silicon Valley, Wall Street, or Washington D.C. It came from New Jersey.
And here’s the kicker. The barriers that used to hold this back — regulation, tech reliability, public sector buy-in — are starting to fall. Fast.
This is exactly what tokenization advocates like Chainlink’s Sergey Nazarov have been preaching. Speaking at Consensus earlier this month, Nazarov said tokenization is “the next internet moment,” one that will bring trillions of dollars of traditional assets onchain. His point? Once the right infrastructure and institutions align, it’s game on.
Well, that alignment is happening — one deed at a time.
And now, the retail side joins in
Just days before Bergen’s $240 billion tokenization news broke, another project made waves from the retail side: TokenFi.
Launched on May 21, TokenFi RWA is aiming to do for everyday people what these government and institutional systems are doing at scale. The pitch? Anyone — yes, even you — can tokenize real-world assets with just a few clicks.
