“You own the token and the token is the asset, you own the asset. It’s different. It’s what we call title tokenization,” Chris Turner, co-founder of impact investment firm Kula, said on the On The Margin podcast.
Most tokenized real-world assets do not work that way. “But you don’t own the asset. The asset owner owns the asset. You just got a referential or a contractual claim,” Turner said. The tokenized RWA market hit about $31 billion at the end of the first quarter of 2026, and Kula’s wager is that the gap between holding title and holding a claim is the thing the market skipped over. Kula VASP Limited is licensed by the Financial Services Commission of Mauritius, and is running a proof of concept with asset manager Lionhart Capital to issue regulated title on chain.
From failed aid budgets to a blockchain epiphany
Turner spent more than 20 years in international development before crypto, and he is blunt about why he left. “Earlier in my career, I kept coming across projects and business ventures or infrastructure development projects or actual full-scale aid projects that would promise the world and would deliver very little,” he said. One review broke him. On about $2.2 billion of aid into a single country, “we did the assessment and we found out that only 300,000 US dollars had actually reached grassroots interventions,” Turner said.
The numbers got massaged on the way up the chain, too. “By the time it’s at township level, it’s 75. By the time it’s reported up to the regional capital, it’s 150. And by the time it reaches the national capital, it’s 300,” he said of a project he watched serve 50 farmers. Then in 2017 he heard a shipping firm describe tracking its cargo on a blockchain. “So I listened to that and thought, okay, that’s the solution to the problem that I have,” Turner recalled.
$25 million, six projects, and politicians on the cap table
Kula has raised about $25 million over four years and put it into roughly six projects, including in Zambia, Kenya and Nepal. To read the local politics, it hired accordingly. “We’ve got the former prime minister of Ethiopia that works with Kula,” Turner said, plus a former Kenyan Senate majority speaker. The firm also makes founders share the upside on the ground. “We’ll invest in you, but unless you’re seeding some of the equity” for local stakeholders, “we won’t invest,” he said. Some founders walk.
Verification is where Turner says the chain earns its keep. On one carbon project, “all of that data has been collected by IoT devices straight off the machinery and straight off the solar generation,” he said. “So we get it straight onto the chain, verified at source, timestamped, and we can verify and prove that.” He marks the limit himself: “We can’t prove that that original data isn’t manipulated when it’s human-orientated.” The point, he said, is “not just saying you’ll do it, but proving you’ve done it and showing it for the world to watch and see.” The industry’s word for the alternative, he noted, is greenwashing.
Riding the institutional RWA wave
Kula is riding a broader push to move hard assets on chain. At Streamex, Henry McPhie has built a yield-paying gold token. “Instead of just taking that gold and sitting at a bank vault, we make that gold active,” McPhie said on the On The Margin podcast. The other pull is access. “You can’t invest in the gold mine because you need 300 million dollars, but you can buy a token,” Turner said of fractionalization. Chan Ahn of Tessera said on the On The Margin podcast that private markets are where “real alpha really lives. But it was always gate kept to top 0.1% through paperwork, minimum tickets and geography.”
Turner walls this off from the last hype cycle. NFTs were “people paying enormous amounts of money for pictures,” he said, and “those assets are now worth very, very, very little compared to what they were paid for originally.” Tokenization, in his telling, breaks a real, legally backed asset into pieces small investors can actually buy.
The Africa bet
His biggest conviction is geographic. “This next 50 years, the rest of this century really is Africa’s time. And I’m really bullish on Africa,” Turner said, citing a generation that came up after a schooling push “15, 20 or so years ago.” He points to mobile money as the template. “East Africa produced one of the most interesting and innovative ways of moving money through M-Pesa that didn’t exist in the West,” he said, and “they produced something the West didn’t have and still doesn’t have at scale.” The continent’s history of local currencies moving on-chain is part of why he thinks the next leap can happen there.
Whether regulators beyond Mauritius will treat a token as the asset, and not a pointer to it, is the open question the Lionhart pilot is meant to answer. Turner frames the company the way he frames its deals. “You’ve got to have humility, resource well your weaknesses quickly and get out of the way,” he said.
