Some initiatives go beyond payments and focus on credit and financing.
The digitization of financial or real assets is allowing new transaction and investment formats. The key is the digital representation of the asset (tokenization) in a secure network of immutable blocks (blockchain), with rules imputed to algorithms (smart contracts).
Argentina’s Agrotoken created a Visa card based on stored or ongoing harvests for rural producers. In addition to being a counterpart in the analogue world, tokenization moves the company’s marketplace, with partners such as Banco CNH, for financing equipment, and Cibra, a supplier of fertilizers.
The system digitized the barter environment, where grains are exchanged for inputs, with greater guarantee fractionation capacity. The model already serves soy, corn or wheat and each ton corresponds to a token, divisible up to four decimal places. Sugar cane, coffee and beef have projects to order and the company is invested in by Visa, with whom it participated in the lift test environment, by the Central Bank (BC), together with Microsoft and Sinqia.
Other initiatives lean toward credit and financing. BlockBR, a provider of tokenization infrastructure for financial agents, tokenized bank credit notes (CCBs) for agribusiness companies to select the best credit offers for their grain and livestock suppliers.
The company was born in 2021 with the tokenization of a CCB for the SD metals industry. The offer for a single institutional investor reached R$ 1.25 million, with payment of 1.88% per month. According to Cássio Krupinsk, CEO of BlockBR, the result was a cheaper operation, with the credit rate falling from 2.8% to 2.03%.
The company currently serves clients such as Rio Bravo Investimentos, for whom it tokenized a managed portfolio quota, structured a private equity investment fund (FIP) for a group of investors and created T Properties, for the real estate sector. The first movement, in Ceará, involved the sale of 70% of tourist property to a buyer via token. The remainder can be sold or managed by the company for lease, for example.
Netspaces CEO Andreas Blazoudakis created the initiative in 2020 to enable real-time real estate transactions, linking the token to the property registration through a company created specifically for this. Today, there are 40 properties, each represented by a token with specific governance and an average value of R$500,000.
The format allowed the sale of 20% of an apartment to a resident, who pays rent on the remaining 80%. A commercial room in Porto Alegre (RS) has 9,000 owners, most of whom receive a promotional fraction of the token to try out the model. New financing formats include partial acquisition of the token, with the purchase of more pieces over time, or full purchase guaranteed by the sale of the token, not the property. “In the event of default, the owner does not lose the good and can pay the rent on the rest”, says Blazoudakis.
Bolsa OTC created a system to make the issuance of debentures or credit assets cheaper through tokens that embed processes such as registration, settlement and custody of assets and reduce costs with lawyers, internal auditing and credit analysis, expanding access by small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). In the lift, from BC, tokenized CCB of BRL 10 million from Bradesco to analyze issues such as potential for automation, privacy and resilience. Currently, it has projects with three institutions and is targeting the secondary market. “Small investors can access higher-volume securities,” says Paulo Oliveira, CEO of Bolsa OTC.
Crowdfunding platform SMU finalized in June a fixed income token offering in commercial notes for the Muda group, a specialist in waste management, reverse logistics and circular economy, which raised BRL 600,000. The project participated in the regulatory test environment of the Brazilian Securities Commission (CVM) to create a secondary market for tokenized crowdfunding assets.
Source: Valor Econômico
