Six more German banks have entered Europe’s regulated crypto-asset market

On the surface, this is a banking and crypto story.

For Blocksquare, it points to something bigger.

Europe is building regulated infrastructure for an economy where crypto-assets can increasingly operate alongside traditional financial institutions. At the same time, real-world assets are moving on-chain.

Real estate could be one of the largest opportunities at the intersection of those two trends.

When banks move on-chain, the market changes

The most interesting part of Germany’s MiCA lead isn’t the number 79.

It’s who is joining.

The six latest additions are cooperative banks: Raiffeisenbank Aidlingen, Ihre Volksbank, VR-Bank Mittelfranken Mitte, Volksbank Euskirchen, VR Bank Ried-Überwald and Volksbank Backnang.

Germany’s total has risen from 57 authorised CASPs at the end of June to 79 today.

BaFin, Germany’s financial regulator, has attributed the country’s lead partly to the size of its financial sector and the number of credit institutions eligible to provide crypto-asset services, as well as Germany’s pre-existing licensing regime.

This is an important signal.

MiCA is moving beyond a framework primarily associated with crypto-native companies. Traditional financial institutions are increasingly becoming participants in Europe’s regulated crypto-asset economy.

For tokenized real estate, that matters.

Because the long-term opportunity isn’t simply putting property on a blockchain. It is connecting real estate to a regulated digital financial system.

Real estate tokenization has a classification problem

Europe has made significant progress in regulating digital assets, but tokenizing a property doesn’t automatically tell you which regulation applies.

The central question is how the token itself is classified.

A common real estate tokenization model creates a Special Purpose Vehicle, or SPV, that owns the property and then tokenizes shares in that company.

That structure can result in the tokens being classified as transferable securities under MiFID II, bringing the tokenized structure into the securities regulatory framework.

Blocksquare has taken a different approach.

Rather than tokenizing shares in an SPV, the Blocksquare framework is designed around property tokens that provide access to defined economic rights related to a specific real estate asset.

The distinction is fundamental.

Under the EU regulatory framework, crypto-assets that do not qualify as financial instruments under MiFID II can instead fall within MiCA.

For Blocksquare, this isn’t simply a theoretical interpretation of European regulation.

It is a question we took directly into dialogue with European regulators.

Blocksquare took real estate tokenization into the European Blockchain Sandbox

In 2025, Blocksquare was selected for the third cohort of the European Blockchain Sandbox, a European Commission initiative designed to bring blockchain innovators and regulators together to examine real-world legal and regulatory questions.

Blocksquare was one of 20 blockchain and DLT use cases selected for the cohort.

Our regulatory dialogue involved 18 participating regulators and authorities from across the EU and EEA, representing areas including financial supervision, central banking, notarial bodies, EU-level oversight and digital innovation.

One of the central topics was precisely the question facing tokenized real estate:

MiFID II or MiCA?

The dialogue examined how Blocksquare’s economic-rights framework is designed to avoid classification as a transferable security under MiFID II, with its non-SPV structure forming an important part of that analysis.

It also explored the conditions under which MiCA, rather than MiFID II, may apply to property token structures, subject to jurisdiction-specific legal analysis.

That distinction is important.

Participation in the Sandbox wasn’t a regulatory licence or blanket approval of every property token in every European jurisdiction.

It was something arguably more useful for building long-term infrastructure: direct regulatory dialogue around how a new model for tokenized real estate fits within Europe’s evolving legal framework.

And token classification was only part of that conversation.

Connecting the blockchain to the actual property

A property token is only as useful as the legal framework behind it.

That is why Blocksquare’s work in the Sandbox also addressed AML/KYC architecture and, critically, the connection between blockchain tokens and the underlying real estate.

The Blocksquare Notarized Real Estate Tokenization Framework was developed with international law firm CMS and established through Blocksquare SARL in Luxembourg.

Instead of creating an SPV for each property, the framework follows a three-phase process.

• First, the token contract is deployed and tokens are issued and allocated through a token loan agreement. The legal process involves local notarisation and, where applicable, a mortgage charge registered with the relevant land registry.

• Second, the property owner adopts a corporate resolution defining the economic rights accessible to token holders. That document is stored on IPFS and its cryptographic hash is registered on the token smart contract, creating a verifiable link between the legal documentation and the blockchain token.

• Third, property tokens can be distributed through KYC-whitelisted marketplaces, with transactions settling peer-to-peer.

The result is an architecture that connects three worlds that have historically been separate:

property law, digital assets and blockchain markets.

Now put MiCA back into the picture

This is where Germany’s latest news becomes particularly relevant.

The Blocksquare model doesn’t exist in isolation.

For tokenized real estate to reach meaningful scale, the surrounding digital asset economy also needs to mature.

It needs regulated service providers.

It needs compliant investor onboarding.

It needs payment and settlement infrastructure.

It needs fiat and stablecoin connectivity.

It needs banks willing and able to interact with crypto-assets.

And it needs a regulatory framework that allows these different participants to operate across Europe.

MiCA is creating an important part of that foundation.

Germany reaching 79 authorised CASPs, with more traditional banks entering the market, shows that this infrastructure is no longer hypothetical.

It is being built now.

From tokenizing properties to connecting them

Blocksquare has already demonstrated that real estate can be brought on-chain at scale.

As of August 2026, more than $216 million of real estate across 30 countries had been tokenized through Blocksquare infrastructure, with 18 active marketplaces operating across the ecosystem.

But bringing properties on-chain is only the first part of the opportunity.

The next question is what happens when those assets can interact.

That is where Oceanpoint comes in.

Oceanpoint is the ecosystem layer built on top of Blocksquare’s tokenization infrastructure.

The Oceanpoint Marketplace provides a live implementation of the Blocksquare protocol where property owners can tokenize and list individual assets for verified investors.

Oceanpoint’s DeFi layer extends that model further, enabling property token staking and connecting marketplace operators, property owners and investors through a common ecosystem.

This moves the conversation beyond fractional ownership.

The bigger goal is an on-chain real estate economy.

Imagine a European network of tokenized properties

A building in Berlin will always be a German property.

A building in Paris will remain subject to French property law. The same is true in Madrid, Vienna, Ljubljana or Lisbon.

Tokenization doesn’t remove that local legal reality.

What it can change is the infrastructure through which the economic value of those properties is accessed and exchanged.

Individual properties can remain anchored to local legal systems, including local notarisation and land registries, while their digital economic layer connects to increasingly standardized blockchain infrastructure.

That creates the possibility of something real estate has never had before:

• a network of individually tokenized properties connected through common digital rails.

Oceanpoint is being built for that environment.

Europe may have an advantage

Europe is often portrayed as a difficult place to build blockchain businesses because of regulation.

For real-world asset tokenization, regulatory clarity could become an advantage.

Real estate is too valuable, too legally complex and too closely connected to the traditional financial system for tokenization to scale on technology alone. Regulation has to be part of the infrastructure.

That is why Blocksquare participated in the European Blockchain Sandbox. It is why the distinction between MiFID II and MiCA matters. It is why notarisation, land registries, AML/KYC and digital identity matter alongside smart contracts.

And it is why the arrival of more European banks under MiCA deserves the attention of the real estate industry. The more mature Europe’s regulated crypto-asset infrastructure becomes, the easier it becomes to connect real-world assets to it.

The next phase of tokenization is about infrastructure

The first era of real estate tokenization asked a simple question:

Can we put real estate on-chain?

That question has largely been answered.

The next questions are harder.

• Can tokenized properties operate within clear regulatory frameworks?

• Can investors understand and verify the rights behind a token?

• Can blockchain infrastructure connect with property law and land registries?

• Can banks, crypto-asset service providers and marketplaces interact within the same regulated ecosystem?

• And can thousands of individually tokenized properties eventually become part of a connected digital market?

Germany’s latest MiCA milestone suggests that one important part of that infrastructure is moving quickly.

Blocksquare’s work through the European Blockchain Sandbox has focused on another: establishing a regulatory pathway for tokenized real estate that connects property-level economic rights with blockchain infrastructure.

Oceanpoint brings those pieces together at the market level.