This is a segment from the Empire newsletter. To read full editions, subscribe . Manifest, a firm focused on bringing US private equity real estate onchain, raised a $2.5 million round to bring together real estate and DeFi. The round was led by VanEck Ventures with participation from Compound, Lattice Fund and SALT. This is the latest company on CEO Nathaniel Sokoll-Ward’s resume. He’s been a career founder, having founded other firms like Roostify, which focused on mortgages. After a stint in Argentina to spend time in a space that embraces crypto, Sokoll-Ward and his co-founder came up with Manifest, a way for folks to get a piece of the American pie…so to speak. Their first offering is USH, an ERC-20 token that promises 13% annual returns by providing exposure to US residential real estate through Home Equity Investments, which is exactly what it sounds like: a financial tool designed to unlock the equity in a home. My biggest question for Sokoll-Ward was simple. How is this any different from other real estate stuff – like the kind we heard about during the last cycle, and which ultimately didn’t seem to catch momentum? “The graveyard there is really deep,” he acknowledged. “Most importantly, it is on the asset permissionless side, right? So, typically, people have done real estate and these like walled garden sort of things, sort of atmospheres where you had to be KYC’d and every subscript transaction was KYC, AML checked as well. In my mind, that was just sort of like tokenization as theater, right? Because even though the assets might actually be tokenized, if you can’t actually use DeFi infrastructure, then who the hell cares? It’s just like normal investing, but with more steps in between.” Remember how I said they were backing the token with HEIs? The simplest way to explain that is tokenizing a mortgage. So, Manifest is “essentially a capital markets layer on these originators in the United States…so we’re tapping into a $35 trillion market.” Because of the way this operates, the overhang that marked the death knell for a lot of the other tokenized real estate projects isn’t going to impact Manifest. Further, because Sokoll-Ward says he was able to utilize some of his past mortgage industry connections — as well as paying a lot of legal bills for consults — to create Manifest. “These guys have created the unlock for the first wave of assets that’s starting with real estate,” VanEck’s Wyatt Lonergan told me. “But you can imagine that there are so many different parallels, so many different portfolios and baskets of assets that you could start to create with the same logic, same legal structure.” The token is “inherently yield-bearing and that’s the next step, in our opinion, in tokenization,” he added. For Lonergan, Manifest was an opportunity to get exposure in an area that both Circle and VanEck have previously tried to get access to. Manifest, in the future, would look to expand its token offerings to other assets that can only be acquired on a private equity basis at this moment. This round, Sokoll-Ward said, helps to “stand up” the fund structure and offer it to the public. The team plans to expand and pay some bills after extensive visits with lawyers to figure out the legality of their product. “This is really a follow-the-money type of thesis,” Lonergan told me. He believes that the graveyard of failed firms marks an opportunity as more folks focus on tokenization. Let’s just not bring back “real estate in the metaverse” as a narrative though, okay? Get the news in your inbox. Explore Blockworks newsletters: Blockworks Daily : The newsletter that helps thousands of investors understand crypto and the markets, by Byron Gilliam. Empire : Start your morning with the top news and analysis to inform your day in crypto. Forward Guidance : Reporting and analysis on the growing intersection of crypto and macroeconomics, policy and finance. 0xResearch : Alpha directly in your inbox. Market highlights, data, degen trade ideas, governance updates, token performance and more. Lightspeed : Built for Solana investors, developers and community members. The latest from one of crypto’s hottest networks. The Drop : For crypto collectors and traders, covering apps, games, memes and more.
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