What should determine the price of a real-world asset on Blockchain?

The question sounds simple. In practice, it is one of the hardest problems in RWA Tokenization, because real-world assets like real estate, funds, and securities carry value that depends on multiple variables at once: market conditions, macroeconomic data, jurisdiction-specific regulations, and factors unique to each asset itself.

The traditional answer has been to hire specialists to conduct valuations quarterly or annually. That worked in a world where things moved slowly. In a world of tokenized assets that trade around the clock, it no longer does.

AI is changing that equation.

A Market Growing Faster Than Most People Expected

The on-chain RWA market grew from approximately $5 billion in 2022 to $24 billion by mid-2025, a 380% increase in just a few years. And that growth has not come primarily from retail investors. It has come from institutions like BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, and BNY Mellon that have begun tokenizing real assets at production scale.

As more large institutions enter this space, the demand for infrastructure that can genuinely support compliance, identity, and settlement grows with them. That is precisely the ground SIX Protocol was built on from the beginning.

As of June 2024, 12% of real estate firms globally had already implemented tokenization, and 46% were actively piloting it. That number tells us something important: large financial institutions are currently deciding which infrastructure to build on. Whoever is ready to serve them first holds the advantage. This is why Institutional Assets sits in SIX’s 2026 Roadmap, not because it sounds good, but because the window to position as the infrastructure these institutions choose is open right now.

The Problem With Traditional Asset Pricing

Before talking about what AI will change, it helps to understand what is broken.

Valuations update too slowly. Traditional appraisals of real estate or funds happen in cycles, not in real time. During periods of rapid market movement, the price displayed may already be weeks or months out of date.

Tokenization using Blockchain helps reduce processes that typically pass through multiple intermediaries, which usually cost 2 to 5% of the asset value and take months to complete. But even if you remove the intermediaries, the problem of infrequent pricing remains. Without AI processing data in real time, a faster structure still relies on stale numbers.

There is also the problem of inconsistency, where two appraisers looking at the same asset can arrive at different figures, and fragmented data that must be manually aggregated from multiple sources. These are the bottlenecks that prevent the RWA market from scaling to its actual potential.

What AI Changes About RWA Pricing

AI models process market data, historical trends, and macroeconomic signals to deliver dynamic and transparent asset pricing. But that is only part of the picture, because AI changes the entire process, not just the final number.

Real-time valuation: Instead of waiting for a quarterly appraisal, an AI system reads current rental rates, the latest real estate indices, interest rate movements, and nearby transaction data, then computes the present value immediately. For tokenized assets that trade around the clock, this is not a convenience. It is a requirement.

Source: Medium / AI Tools for Real Estate Tokenization 2026

Detecting signals humans miss: AI can process large volumes of market data and historical trends far faster than any human and can identify patterns that often go unnoticed, such as the relationship between interest rate changes and real estate token values. This gives investors a more complete foundation for decision-making.

Source: Nadcab / AI Real Estate Tokenization 2026

Reducing valuation bias: When AI applies the same dataset and the same process every time, the inconsistency introduced by human judgment decreases. That makes it easier for investors to compare asset values across different tokenized projects on equal terms.

Source: Taazaa / Predicting Property Value Fluctuations with AI

Scaling compliance automatically: AI agents automate KYC/AML verification and jurisdictional compliance checks, significantly reducing legal risk exposure for tokenized assets. In a world where the same asset class carries different regulatory requirements depending on the country, this capability is what allows RWA projects to expand across borders in practice.

Source: Nadcab / AI Real Estate Tokenization 2026

Where Blockchain Fits in This Picture

AI makes pricing faster and more accurate. But it also raises a new question. If AI is determining what an asset is worth, who can prove what data it used, what process it followed, and that it was not manipulated?

AI transforms tokenization from a static digitization process into an intelligent system capable of real-time decision-making and continuous optimization. But a smarter system also requires greater transparency, because in institutional finance every number must be traceable.

When AI-generated valuations are recorded on-chain, every step becomes auditable: the input data the AI used, the process applied, and the result produced. All of it sits in an immutable record. For institutional investors who must demonstrate to regulators that the prices they use have a clear and verifiable origin, this is not optional. It is baseline infrastructure.

What to Watch in the Next Phase

Automated Valuation Models on Blockchain are beginning to emerge in real estate tokenization, particularly in markets where transaction data is dense enough to support them. These will serve as the template for AI-driven pricing across other asset classes.

Source: RIT Repository / Predictive Modeling of Tokenized Real Estate Prices

Dynamic NAV for tokenized funds: Tokenized dividend-paying funds including Treasury and money-market offerings grew 80% in 2025. As these funds trade around the clock, waiting for daily or weekly NAV calculations will become a bottleneck. AI that computes NAV in real time will shift from being an advantage to being a requirement.

Source: CoinLaw

Regulatory acceptance of AI-generated valuations: The passage of the GENIUS Act in July 2025 established a federal framework and standardized settlement infrastructure for payment stablecoins. It signals that regulators are getting more serious about setting rules for digital assets broadly. Once there is clarity on AI-generated valuations specifically, adoption will accelerate.

Source: Chainalysis

SIX’s Perspective

Real-time asset valuation has always been one of the clearest examples of a problem that Blockchain alone cannot solve. It requires both AI’s ability to process large volumes of data and Blockchain’s capacity to make that processing transparent and verifiable at the same time.

With 46% of real estate firms worldwide still in the process of piloting tokenization, the infrastructure that supports credible, accurate, and auditable asset pricing will be a deciding factor in which platforms these institutions choose when they are ready to deploy at scale.

SIX is actively exploring this direction, not because it is an interesting feature, but because we see it as a foundational requirement for RWA infrastructure that can genuinely serve institutional-grade use cases, and it is the reason Institutional Assets sits in SIX’s Roadmap this year.

We have previously told the story from the angle of AI coming in to help Blockchain and RWA work more smoothly. Now we want to talk about something equally important: the role of Blockchain at a time when everyone is turning to AI and AI agents, and why AI still lacks several critical capabilities that Blockchain can provide.

a16z crypto, one of the most closely followed voices in crypto and Web3 analysis, recently published an article titled “The Missing Infrastructure for AI Agents: 5 Ways Blockchains Can Help.” The article outlines 5 core things AI still cannot do on its own, but Blockchain can help with:

1. Identity for non-humans

2. Governing AI-run systems

3. Gaps in traditional payment systems

4. Repricing trust in the economy

5. Preserving user control

If AI agents operate alone, they still cannot fully deliver on all 5 of these. SIX Network has the tools to make each of them concrete, including payments, usage rights management, trustworthiness, and data verification. That infrastructure is SIX Protocol.

SIX Network builds technology that is right for this moment.

At a time when financial institutions and major projects are moving into RWA assets, building Blockchain-based systems, and deploying AI agents to help run operations,

SIX Network is building the complete infrastructure for an era where Blockchain and AI must work together.

We approach this not by chasing trends that may fade, but by studying the long-term direction of RWA Tokenization, a market that has been growing at a remarkable pace. As we have often said, the rise of RWA is drawing major financial institutions and a growing number of investors into this space. The more demand a market attracts, the more its value expands. That is a strong signal that RWA may become a foundational part of the Financial Infrastructure of the future.

Beyond a16z crypto, Eigen Labs, the team behind EigenLayer and a research and product development company currently exploring the intersection of crypto and AI just as we are, has written about AI agents in a way worth noting:

“We have come a long way, from rule-based bots to chatbots, from chatbots to agents that can use tools, and now we are moving toward autonomous agents that operate over longer and longer time horizons. But the next step is not just greater autonomy. It is ownership. Once agents own productive digital property, the question of investability follows naturally.”

All of this is why SIX has been actively studying and experimenting with how AI can be applied to Blockchain. Because it is not only a matter of AI becoming a tool that merges with Blockchain to form a complete solution. The reverse is equally true: AI having Blockchain as its foundation makes it more complete as well. For example, it helps reduce delivery timelines from projects that used to take months or years down to a single month. It makes system testing faster. It helps development teams catch errors in code or smart contracts early, before they reach production. All of this lowers the cost of building and lets teams focus more of their energy on what actually matters.

Blockchain at SIX Network

offers a complete solution for AI integration,

becoming a tool that genuinely works in full.

If you recall the gaps that a16z identified, covering identity, governance, payments, trust, and user control, what is worth noting is that SIX Protocol as the Blockchain infrastructure of SIX Network was built from the ground up in a way that already addresses each of them.

On transactions and trust: AI agents operating on SIX Protocol can execute and settle transactions in real time around the clock without going through intermediaries. More importantly, every transaction is recorded on-chain in a way that is fully transparent and cannot be altered, giving both financial institutions and users the ability to trace every step. In a world where AI is making transactions on behalf of humans, having a verifiable audit trail is not just a nice-to-have capability. It is a requirement.

On compliance: SIX Protocol supports automated verification of regulatory requirements. When an AI agent takes any action, the system can immediately verify whether that action falls within the legal boundaries of each relevant jurisdiction, without waiting for a human to review it manually. In the world of RWA Tokenization, where each asset class carries different rules depending on where it operates, this is precisely the capability that allows the system to scale.

On rights management: 

SIX Protocol has a permissions system encoded directly into smart contracts, allowing users to define clearly what an AI agent is and is not allowed to do, under what conditions, and with the ability to stop it immediately if something goes wrong. Those permissions are not a policy written on paper. They are code that is transparent, auditable, and enforceable at the protocol level.

The gaps that a16z identified as things AI agents still lack are addressed here. And that is why SIX sees Blockchain not merely as a complement to AI, but as the foundational structure that makes it possible for AI to operate meaningfully in the real world of finance.