Tokenisation in action
More than just hype? Three real-life examples that show how tokenisation can be useful, profitable and fun.
Sport
Sports teams looking to deepen engagement with fans and diversify revenues have been enthusiastic adopters of tokenisation. Manchester City, FC Porto and Paris Saint-Germain are just three top European clubs which have sold fan tokens, giving holders a stake in the club’s governance by allowing them to influence decisions, access exclusive games or secure discounts.
Fan polls, which are often binding on the club, can include things like the music played before matches or the name of a new stadium facility. The tokens can be easily bought and sold and their relatively low price combined with increasingly global fanbases for European football has seen more than 50 clubs issue something similar.
Paris Saint-Germain’s token has the largest market capitalisation among European teams with Brazil’s FC Santos the global leader. Although the tokens absolutely do not confer any ownership rights in the club, their prices sometimes reflect the club’s fortunes. When, in summer 2021 it was reported that Cristiano Ronaldo would join Manchester City, the price of its $CITY fan token jumped 40 percent before dropping when the transfer collapsed. Ronaldo has since launched his own fan token: the Ronaldo Coin.
What started with football has spread to a wide range of sports with fan tokens now available for the Aston Martin Formula One team and mixed martial arts body, the Ultimate Fighting Championships, where holders of its UFC token can vote on who fights who in upcoming bouts.
Forests
Maintaining healthy forests is an essential lever to combat climate change and protect biodiversity. Despite this, deforestation continues to rise globally, in part because logging and converting land for alternative uses such as agriculture can offer forest owners greater and more immediate financial rewards.
Knowing that many owners struggle to balance their wish to preserve forests with the need to provide for their families, an Estonian start-up has created a potential solution. Single.Earth creates digital twins – basically digital copies of real objects or processes that behave exactly like their counterparts in real life. Here the object is a particular forest and the process is nature, allowing Single.Earth to monitor and evaluate the benefits that nature delivers, such as decarbonisation or protecting biodiversity.
Together with advanced data models, Single.Earth is able to give a specific area a digital value in the form of specialised tokens called MERITS. Companies or investors looking to support nature – or indirectly balance their carbon footprints – can buy these tokens, providing an income stream to forest owners while preserving natural habitats.
According to Single.Earth, the system is already preserving 8 million hectares of growing forest in the Amazon and Estonia, removing 130 million tons of CO₂ annually and protecting 270 species in their habitats.
Art
Owning a Picasso or Warhol has always been the stuff of dreams for regular art lovers but innovations in digital assets are now making it possible for ordinary investors to build collections of famous and influential artworks.
A range of investment platforms has emerged, harnessing blockchain technologies to tokenise famous – and not so famous – real world, existing artworks. This is a process that sees the legal title of a physical sculpture or oil painting, for instance, divided up into tradeable tokens. Stored securely on a blockchain, these so-called Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) are official certificates of ownership and authenticity of the underlying artwork.
After tokenising and selling works by Picasso and Salvador Dali, investment platform Artemundi is currently offering a share of ownership of Composition, 1970 by Spanish surrealist Joan Miró, with a 50-euro minimum investment. Another platform, LiveArt, is offering partial ownership of Pumpkin (2), 1990 by Japanese contemporary artist Yayoi Kusama for around the same buy-in price.
While tokenised art cannot be hung on your wall, it offers liquidity, portfolio diversification and potential profits if tokens are sold at a higher price. It also helps break down barriers, making art ownership more practical and accessible.
This page was published in April 2025
Michael Herman
… creates content for Deutsche Bank and writes speeches for its senior executives. He is interested in how technology can democratize art ownership and open up other investment opportunities. He would like to own a (tokenised) Ferrari.
Recommended content
Digital Disruption | Outlook
Invest faster and broader thanks to blockchain Invest faster and broader thanks to blockchain
Stock market and blockchain expert Lidia Kurt on the transformative power of blockchain technology in securities trading and the “Internet of Value”.
Digital Disruption | Crisp & Short
Paper to protocol: money in a tokenised world Paper to protocol: money in a tokenised world
Spotlight on the digital currencies that are taking centre stage in a world of blockchains, computer code, and evolving regulatory landscapes and use cases.
Digital Disruption | Opinion
“In the tokenised economy we can make money smart” “In the tokenised economy we can make money smart”
Investing in luxury hotels or a Picasso painting? Deutsche Bank expert Sabih Behzad explains how a tokenized economy will revolutionize investments and payment flows. And where the risks are lurking.
What Next: our topics
