University: Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT)
Academic supervisors:
Prof. Ibrahim Khalil (Primary – RMIT)
Prof. Zahir Tari (RMIT)
Industry partner: ANZ
Thesis Topic
Tokenization of real assets – a technical approach to privacy, security and compliance
My thesis explores the quality of decentralised markets. Focusing on the role this new market design plays in the price discovery My thesis topic is “Tokenisation of real assets: a technical approach to privacy, security and compliance” and it deals with how we can tokenize real assets such as gold, real estate, art, voting/ownership rights, content licensing, with respect to security/privacy concerns and regulatory/governance concerns to realize optimum benefits from trading these assets and to determine which asset classes have the most potential.
About ANZ
Australian and New Zealand Banking Group (ANZ) is one of the major banks in Australia offering a vast array of financial services from retail to institutional banking. They are keen to expand their service portfolio from traditional financial solutions to decentralised finance (DeFi). ANZ is a pioneer in the DeFi space, being the first bank to mint a digital asset linked to the Australian dollar, the A$DC stablecoin. They are looking at novel services that can benefit from distributed ledger technology.
What part of the business is the researcher involved in?
Banking Services, Digital Assets
What questions/problems is the researcher helping to answer/solve?
Real asset tokenisation poses several challenges such as which assets classes have the most potential, the true ownership of the underlying asset, security/privacy vs transparency concerns (immutability, probabilistic finality, computational overhead) and regulatory/governance concerns (KYC, AML, CTF laws) etc. It is therefore important to explore tokenising real assets in response to the issues raised above so we may realize more benefits from seemingly difficult to trade assets leveraging the benefits of the blockchain.