Sonia Shaw is the Co-Founder and CEO of OneAsset, a compliance-first real-world asset tokenisation platform that makes commercial real estate liquid and globally accessible onchain. Based in Dubai, she leads the company’s mission to bridge institutional property markets and blockchain infrastructure through regulated vault structures and transparent yield distribution.
Previously, Sonia served as President of CoinW and held senior global partnership roles at major crypto exchanges, driving international expansion, regulatory engagement, and strategic growth. She brings extensive experience in scaling digital asset platforms and in building compliant, cross-border market infrastructure.
We caught up with Sonia Shaw, Co-Founder and CEO of OneAsset, at Consensus in Hong Kong last week to discuss why previous attempts at real estate tokenisation stalled and how her platform prioritises legal enforceability over digital hype.
Read more about OneAsset’s approach to treating regulation as a product feature rather than a constraint in the interview below.
OneAsset positions itself as a compliance-first platform for fractional, borderless real estate ownership. What specific gap in existing tokenised real estate models convinced you that the market needed a new approach? What led you to choose the UAE to break ground, and what characteristics are you looking for in the next jurisdictions you expand into?
We identified a critical failure in the market: a lack of operational discipline. Previous projects treated tokenisation as a tech demo rather than a financial product. They lacked the infrastructure to handle cross-border participation or complex lifecycle events.
OneAsset fills this gap by ensuring that ownership rights remain enforceable long after the token is minted.
We chose the UAE because regulators there actively shape frameworks rather than react to them. That regulatory clarity, paired with a naturally global property market, made it the perfect starting point.
Our expansion strategy is guided by infrastructure. We look for jurisdictions with strong service-provider ecosystems and clear treatment of digital securities. We value operational certainty far more than just the size of the local market.
Many RWA protocols pitch “real yield,” but the hardest part is enforcing real-world rights. How do you ensure that a vault share represents enforceable legal ownership rather than just a digital wrapper around an asset?
Enforceability is established before the asset ever touches the blockchain. We anchor each vault in a specific legal structure where economic rights, governance, and limitations are binding.
The token represents these pre-existing legal rights but does not create them. We maintain this enforceability by strictly controlling transferability. This ensures that regulatory compliance and eligibility requirements remain in place throughout the asset’s life, not just at onboarding.
In effect, we treat the token as an operational interface to the legal structure. The blockchain provides transparency and automation, but the actual enforcement relies on disciplined legal design and continuous oversight.
ERC-4626 vault shares are built for interoperability across DeFi. How do you balance that composability with the regulatory constraints tied to the underlying property structure?
Composability is valuable when it respects the constraints of the underlying asset. Real estate operates on slower settlement cycles, is subject to jurisdictional rules, and has eligibility requirements that cannot be abstracted away without introducing risk.
We use ERC-4626 as an accounting and interaction standard, embedding compliance logic at the transfer and access layers. This enables interoperability where appropriate, such as standardised reporting, integrations with compliant platforms, or portfolio tooling, while ensuring regulatory conditions are enforced continuously.
The result is controlled interoperability rather than unrestricted circulation. The design recognises that real-world assets require coordination between technical standards and legal obligations.
Offchain valuation and yield data sit at the heart of the model. What safeguards are in place to ensure that the data bridged onchain is accurate, independently verified, and resistant to conflicts of interest?
We treat data integrity as a governance issue, not a technical one. Valuation and performance data are sourced through independent processes with defined methodologies and review cycles. Responsibility for producing, verifying, and publishing data is deliberately separated to reduce conflicts of interest.
Onchain disclosures are tied to documented source material and include audit trails that enable historical comparison and verification. When data fails consistency checks or becomes stale, automated controls restrict actions that depend on that data until the issue is resolved.
This approach aligns with financial reporting standards rather than price-feed models, reflecting the nature of the underlying assets.
Many tokenised real estate initiatives stall at the secondary liquidity stage. Beyond an in-app marketplace, what do you believe actually drives sustainable liquidity in property-backed tokens?
Sustainable liquidity arises when market participants trust the instrument, understand its behaviour, and can integrate it into existing capital workflows. This requires standardisation, consistent reporting, and clear redemption or exit mechanisms.
Liquidity is also driven by utility. When property-backed tokens can operate within compliant collateral frameworks, portfolio strategies, or structured allocations, participation deepens.
Marketplaces facilitate exchange, but confidence in valuation, governance, and legal rights determines whether capital remains engaged. In this context, liquidity is a consequence of credibility rather than a feature that can be engineered in isolation.
OneAsset is described as being “AI-powered.” Concretely, where does AI sit in the stack today, and where does it meaningfully improve decision-making?
AI is applied where it improves accuracy, speed, and oversight rather than speculative outcomes. Today, it is embedded into our operational workflows to support document analysis, data normalisation, anomaly detection in reporting, and ongoing compliance monitoring across assets and counterparties.
Its primary value lies in surfacing inconsistencies, identifying emerging risks, and supporting human judgment with structured, timely insight. Decision-making remains governed by defined processes and oversight committees, with AI serving as an operational intelligence layer that strengthens controls rather than acting autonomously.
Real estate performance is shaped by fundamentals such as lease quality, occupancy, capital expenditures (capex), and currency exposure. How do you translate those offchain risk factors into signals that onchain investors can understand and evaluate?
We translate fundamentals into structured, transparent indicators that reflect how real estate is assessed offchain, in line with established valuation and reporting standards. Lease duration, tenant concentration, occupancy trends, capital expenditure obligations, and currency exposure are expressed as discrete, interpretable metrics grounded in third-party documentation.
Each signal is linked to its underlying source materials and updated on a defined cadence that aligns with market and regulatory reporting expectations. This allows investors to track changes over time with context, rather than relying on static snapshots.
The objective is to provide clarity without oversimplification, enabling informed evaluation grounded in real-world practice.
Offchain strategies generate the yield, but distribution occurs onchain. What level of transparency and auditability can users realistically expect regarding cash flows and payout timing?
We deliver transparency on two specific levels: onchain execution and offchain verification.
Onchain, we provide a permanent, auditable record of the vault’s accounting. You can see exactly what was distributed, to whom, and under which rules. This automation replaces the slow, opaque reconciliation processes typical of traditional finance.
Offchain, we provide reporting that ties those digital records back to real-world bank transfers. Since real estate cash flows still move through the banking system, timing depends on standard settlement cycles. However, we ensure that the entire process is predictable and that every payout is fully auditable once the funds are confirmed.
You’ve written that regulation is not a constraint but the product. In practical terms, what does that philosophy change about how users interact with OneAsset?
It changes expectations. Users interact with a system in which eligibility, transfer conditions, reporting, and governance are explicit and consistent. There are fewer surprises and clearer boundaries and roles within the ecosystem.
Regulation becomes visible as certainty: defined rights, predictable processes, and clear recourse. This allows users to engage with confidence, knowing the framework they operate within is stable and built for longevity rather than experimentation.
Permissioned vaults introduce KYC and compliance checks. How do you design that experience so it feels native to Web3 rather than a retrofitted TradFi process?
We design the experience around two realities: Web3 users expect self-serve, privacy-respecting flows with clear outcomes, while regulated assets require identity verification, eligibility checks, and ongoing controls. The goal is to make compliance feel like a credential you carry, not a hurdle you repeat.
First, we separate discovery from commitment. Users should be able to explore vault information, methodology, and historical reporting without hitting an immediate wall. Identity checks appear only when a user wants to subscribe, redeem, or transfer.
We make the rules transparent. Web3 users are used to seeing the logic: what is required, what it enables, what it restricts, and why. When people understand the boundaries upfront, they trust the system more and support it longer.
We also focus on speed and dignity. Clear status, minimal back-and-forth, and human support when edge cases arise. Most compliance experiences fail because they feel unpredictable and opaque. Ours is designed to be predictable, explainable, and fast.
Tokenisation has existed in pilot form for years. What do you think separates projects that reach institutional-grade execution from those that remain proof-of-concept?
Institutional execution requires more than just working code. It demands legal resilience, operational maturity, and aligned distribution.
Successful projects build structures that can survive regulatory pressure while maintaining rigorous audit and reporting standards. They ensure the product fits within existing risk frameworks. By contrast, proof-of-concept projects usually demonstrate technical feasibility but lack the governance and compliance layers necessary for real-world adoption.
Trust is central in RWAs, particularly when bridging offchain assets to onchain tokens. Where do you think the industry still underestimates risk?
Legal ambiguity is the most significant overlooked risk. Regulators consistently question what rights the token actually confers. We must clarify whether it represents direct ownership, a contractual claim, or merely exposure to an intermediary.
Operational risk is also frequently underestimated. Many structures rely heavily on a small group of off-chain service providers, such as valuers and administrators. Too often, these setups lack the contingency planning and role segregation required by institutional standards.
Furthermore, data integrity and cross-border enforcement are critical gaps. Authorities prioritise data governance over the technology used to publish it. Additionally, while property rights are local, token distribution is global. Without strict alignment between the two, investor protections weaken significantly.
If OneAsset succeeds, how does investor behaviour change? Are users constructing global real estate portfolios onchain, or does property serve as a composable building block within broader DeFi strategies?
We believe both outcomes will materialise. First, investors would be able to construct diversified global real estate portfolios with a level of flexibility and transparency that was previously impossible.
Second, these property-backed instruments become composable elements within broader, compliant strategies. The fundamental shift is practical. We are moving away from opaque speculation toward a model where real estate is as easy to allocate, monitor, and rebalance as any liquid asset.