Slicing the Cake with Sui: How Asset Tokenisation Makes Shared Ownership Accessible

Authors: George Sextos (Twitter, Linkedin), Giannis Athanasiou (Linkedin)

Asset tokenisation is like slicing a giant cake into smaller pieces and sharing it with your friends. While you might own the whole cake, each friend gets to “own” a piece too. In the world of tokenisation, we apply this concept to valuable assets—like real estate, art, commodities, or even a company—by converting their ownership or economic rights into digital tokens recorded on a blockchain.

These tokens represent small, tradable parts of the original item, enabling fractional ownership. This approach democratises access to traditionally exclusive investments, allowing people to buy, sell, or trade pieces of the asset without needing to own it entirely.

In essence, tokenisation unlocks the potential of shared ownership while maintaining the security, transparency, and flexibility of blockchain technology.

Why Tokenise Assets?

• Accessibility: High-value assets can be split into smaller, affordable units, allowing investors to own fractions of assets like real estate or art without the need for large capital.
• Liquidity: Tokenised assets can be traded on blockchain marketplaces, enabling quick, flexible transactions compared to traditional, illiquid investments.
• Transparency and Security: Blockchain's ensures tamper-proof transactions and clear ownership records, reducing fraud and building trust.
• Global Reach: Tokenisation removes geographical barriers, allowing investors from anywhere in the world to access and invest in a wider range of markets.

Web3 Asset Tokenisation vs. Web2 Systems

Example Use Case: Real Estate

Innovative Applications of Tokenisation

Real Estate

Fractional Ownership: Tokenisation allows investors to purchase fractions of properties rather than entire units, making real estate more accessible. These fractional ownership tokens can also generate proportional rental income, creating a passive revenue stream for investors.

Cross-Border Investment: Traditional real estate investment often involves navigating complex legal and financial systems. Tokenised real estate eliminates these barriers, allowing investors worldwide to participate in markets they couldn’t access before, from luxury apartments in New York to vacation homes in Bali.

Art and Collectibles

Shared Ownership: High-value art pieces and rare collectibles can be out of reach for most buyers. Tokenisation enables multiple enthusiasts or investors to share ownership, benefiting from potential appreciation without the need to buy the entire piece.

Digital Art as NFTs: Artists can tokenise digital artwork as NFTs, selling it globally while retaining verifiable ownership records on the blockchain. These NFTs can include royalties, ensuring creators earn income from secondary sales.

Commodities

Tokenised Gold: Physical gold ownership often comes with challenges like storage and security. Tokenised gold solves these issues, allowing investors to own fractions of gold bars through blockchain tokens, which are tradable and easy to manage.

Supply Chain Transparency: Blockchain technology ensures that commodities like diamonds or rare metals are ethically sourced. Tokenisation tracks the entire supply chain, giving consumers confidence in the origin and legitimacy of their purchases.

Stock and Equity

Startup Shares: Tokenising equity allows startups to raise capital without going through traditional IPOs or venture capital processes. Fractional shares can attract a wider pool of investors, democratising access to equity.

Voting Rights: Tokenised equity can embed voting rights, enabling shareholders to participate in key decisions based on the number of tokens they hold. This creates a more inclusive and transparent governance model.

Through tokenisation, industries from real estate to commodities are experiencing a transformation, creating new opportunities for investors, creators, and businesses while enhancing global accessibility and trust.

Why Sui Excels in Asset Tokenisation?

Sui stands out for its innovative object-centric architecture, which streamlines the management of tokenised assets without impacting the entire blockchain state. Its Kiosk framework enforces trading rules and royalties directly on-chain, eliminating reliance on intermediaries, unlike Ethereum’s marketplace-dependent model.

With parallel transaction processing, Sui delivers unmatched scalability and low transaction fees (often <$0.001), making it affordable for both small and large-scale tokenisation. The platform ensures native royalty enforcement, guaranteeing creators receive compensation for secondary sales, a significant advantage over other chains.

Sui supports dynamic token functionalities like splitting, merging, and burning, tailored for complex real-world assets such as real estate and art. Built on the Move programming language, it offers a secure and developer-friendly environment, reducing the complexity of deploying tokenisation projects.

By combining cost efficiency, scalability, flexibility, and security, Sui sets a new standard for asset tokenisation, making it a superior choice for tokenising both fungible and non-fungible assets.

The Power of Asset Tokenisation on Sui: In a Nutshell

Sui vs. Ethereum: A Brief Comparison

Radar Chart: A Simplified Representation

Smart Contracts Design and Web Assembly (WASM)

A template for the smart contracts that can be utilised to implement asset tokenisation on Sui, is open-source and publicly available in the Asset Tokenisation page of the Sui Developer Guides documentation. The same page includes a detailed guide for the steps required to publish these smart contracts and integrate them with a real-world web application.

Before exploring the implementation of the packages and modules that support the asset tokenisation’s functionality on Sui, let’s understand what would be the end result of tokenising a piece of art.

Representing the assets on the blockchain

Each asset is deployed as a separate package on Sui, with the fragments that belong to this asset being Sui objects of a specific type. As a practical example, you can imagine that publishing the famous piece of art “Mona Lisa”, and tokenising it into 100 fragments would result in the creation —among others— of the following:

• A new Sui package, with its unique ID, e.g. 0x1234…6789
• 100 new Sui objects of the type 0x1234…6789::mona_lisa::MonaLisa

A significant advantage of representing each asset with a separate type is that each asset can be bound to a different TransferPolicy, allowing for different behaviour when interacting with the Kiosk module, and custom rules for its circulation in marketplaces. Now, with the end result of tokenisation in mind, let's explore the specific modules and functionality provided by Sui’s asset tokenisation packages.

The asset_tokenisation package

This package consists of three main modules: tokenised_asset, proxy, and unlock:

• The tokenised_asset module operates as a generalisation of the coin module. It is responsible for handling the on-chain representation of the asset and the fragments (AssetMetadata, TokenisedAsset structs), and the actions that can be performed on them, including minting, splitting, joining, and burning.
• The proxy module facilitates interactions with tokenised assets, providing interfaces for creating and managing Transfer Policies to ensure a smooth integration with Sui’s Kiosks. It ensures that tokenised assets operate within their defined policies, supporting rules like royalties.
• The unlock module is used in conjunction with the Kiosk standard to manage the unlocking of assets for the specific authorised actions of burning and joining fragments.

The template package

The template package is built to integrate smoothly with Rust’s Web Assembly, allowing users to seamlessly create new assets on the browser. Its main module is named template and acts as a skeleton, whose fields (name, description, etc) can be edited on the fly with Web Assembly, empowering publishing assets with dynamically-defined metadata, using the same smart contract scaffold. This means that developing a new Sui Move smart contract is not needed to publish and fragmentise a new asset on-chain.

Building a real-world tokenisation application

Web Assembly actually allows Move byte-code serialisation and deserialisation on the web. This practically allows for a user to publish a new package on the Sui blockchain, without the need to write any code.

Therefore, building a web application that allows users to create new assets and tokenise them on Sui is essentially about providing a graphical interface for inserting the information and executing the steps visualised in the following diagram.

As a next step, users can utilise the native Kiosk features to purchase these fragments, or even interact with the tokenised_asset module to perform more advanced actions on their fragments, such as splitting or joining them.

The Competitive Edge of Sui

Sui’s advanced infrastructure establishes it as a leader in blockchain-based asset tokenisation, seamlessly blending transparency, automation, and flexibility. Its object-centric architecture and Kiosk framework enable efficient fractional ownership, enforce royalties, and manage trading permissions directly at the protocol level. With parallel transaction processing, Sui delivers high scalability and low fees, making tokenisation accessible to creators, investors, and platforms. By combining scalability, security, and usability, Sui empowers the tokenised economy and drives the future of decentralised ownership across industries.

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