Public PoW blockchain Kadena makes its first capital deployment from a $50 million grants program, backing UK startup CurveBlock in the Bank of England’s Digital Securities Sandbox.
Kadena has awarded the first grant from its new $50 million ecosystem fund, allocating $400,000 to CurveBlock, a UK-based startup building tokenized real estate inside a regulated financial sandbox.
The milestone marks a pivotal intersection between open blockchain infrastructure and government-led experimentation with digital securities, underscoring growing institutional appetite for compliant pathways into tokenized real-world assets (RWAs).
CurveBlock is the first real estate firm accepted into the UK’s Digital Securities Sandbox (DSS), a joint initiative of the Bank of England and the Financial Conduct Authority.
The DSS allows blockchain-native financial instruments to operate under modified CSD and exchange rules through 2028, enabling the issuance, trading, and settlement of digital securities with relaxed regulatory constraints.
$50 million tokenization fund
Kadena’s grant is the first deployment from its newly expanded $50 million program, half of which ($25M) is explicitly earmarked for RWA tokenization.
The initiative is designed to support builders working on tokenized debt, real estate, and other compliant asset rails, with applicants eligible for equity-free funding, infrastructure support, and code review.
CurveBlock’s grant reflects growing interest in aligning public blockchain tech with real-world institutional demand.
“Our Grants Program and token standards are essential to enabling compliant, scalable tokenization,” said Stuart Popejoy, CEO of Kadena. “We’re doubling down on ecosystem real-world use cases institutions need.”
The DSS launched in late 2024 and represents one of the world’s most advanced attempts at legally enabling digital securities experimentation.
Participating firms can scale projects through a series of regulatory gates. CurveBlock recently cleared Gate 1 with support from Kadena and will continue testing live real estate tokenization flows over the coming months.
Annelise Osborne, Kadena’s Chief Business Officer and former Moody’s executive, believes that a lack of infrastructure, not institutional interest, is the real bottleneck for RWA adoption. “With this $25 million, I really hope we’ll have a lot more builders and a lot more fintechs that come from the tokenization side… I’m a huge believer that they’re going to grow,” she told American Banker.
Osborne has also noted the importance of proof-of-work infrastructure, like Kadena’s Chainweb, in delivering scalable and secure tokenization rails.
Proof of Work in tokenized real estate
Kadena’s approach differs from many rivals in that it combines parallelized PoW chains with upcoming EVM compatibility and a token standard designed for compliance.
The grant program’s broader goal is to accelerate the adoption of this infrastructure for real-world applications, particularly where on-chain permissioning and regulatory controls are critical.
The real estate tokenization market alone is projected to grow to $19.4 billion by 2033, with recent months seeing a 260% surge in overall RWA market cap to $23 billion.
Institutions including Goldman Sachs, HSBC, and BlackRock are actively piloting tokenized securities, suggesting that demand for compliant blockchain rails is no longer hypothetical.
Kadena’s grant to CurveBlock is a notable signal that public-chain infrastructure may yet play a central role in that evolution.
If successful, the experiment could shape not just the future of tokenized real estate in the UK, but also influence US and EU approaches to sandbox-based digital finance.
At a Glance – Kadena’s RWA Grant Program
- Total Pool: $50 million
- Focus Areas: Real-world asset tokenization, Chainweb EVM, AI x Blockchain
- Funding Type: Equity-free grants
- Support: Technical assistance, code reviews, UI feedback, marketing amplification
- Timeline: Rolling applications, 2–4 week review cycle
Key Milestones
- Sep 2024: UK DSS opens for applications
- May 2025: CurveBlock accepted into DSS; Kadena expands grant fund to $50M
- June 2025: CurveBlock receives first $400K grant
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