Edwin, CEO and co-founder of Brickken, spent a decade as an M&A lawyer watching deals bog down in fragmented paperwork, reconciliation headaches, and opaque ownership records. That friction pushed him toward blockchain in 2018, initially to solve an oracle data problem, and by 2021 he had co-founded Brickken to digitize and tokenize financial instruments like equity, bonds, and real estate. The company first tried crowdfunding real estate itself before realizing the real opportunity was supplying tokenization infrastructure to other builders, leading to a full rebuild of its tech stack around 2022 to 2023. Edwin describes learning that institutions demand the same compliance, security, and disaster recovery standards as traditional finance, and that BlackRock's 2023 move onto Ethereum was the turning point that legitimized the sector. He reflects on founder conflict nearly killing the company, the loneliness of being a CEO, and why tokenization ultimately expands access to private market opportunities across borders that were previously locked behind personal networks.
An ex M&A lawyer explains why he rebuilt Brickken from scratch to bring institutional grade infrastructure to tokenized ownership.
What is Brickken and why should people care?
We build the digitization of financial instruments using blockchain technology, so we can digitize and tokenize equity, bonds, treasuries, commodities, or gold. We provide a software as a service solution that lets companies in any geography tokenize whatever assets they want. We've been doing this for over six years, it's a niche tokenization as a service business.
What made you think there had to be a better way to structure ownership after years in M&A law?
I was practicing when documents were still on paper, then digitization came. But value always needed reconciling between counterparties in a buyout. There were problems that should have been simple, like knowing IP value, where assets were, or why bank accounts didn't reconcile with the books. It was painful because everybody owns their own information and data, and sharing isn't free.
How did you tell the difference between building crypto and building better infrastructure for ownership?
I wasn't even in crypto until 2021. In 2018 I needed to store what I later learned was called oracles, to put offline value online reliably. I realized this meant everyone could access value in transactions 24/7 worldwide with the same data point. I fell in love with the infrastructure itself, the open ledger, and stayed focused on that even while everyone else chased NFTs and the metaverse.
What did Brickken's first version actually look like and who were the first customers?
We started out democratizing real estate, lowering the ticket size, managing properties funded by the crowd. We wanted tokenization for exposure and to avoid losing money to fees on cross border transfers. After a year of studying in 2020 and 2021 we realized others would try to build the same infrastructure, so we pivoted to become the supplier of that technology instead of managing assets ourselves.
What did the market teach you in those early months that your legal background hadn't?
The best school is a startup. As a lawyer I was stuck in contracts and corporate work, but as a founder you suddenly become marketing, sales, everything, because there's no one else. It taught me to respect business owners, because the day to day is brutal. Someone once told me being a CEO is the loneliest job in the world, and that really stuck with me.
Once you realized issuance wasn't the product, what did you have to rip up and rebuild inside Brickken?
We had two years of infrastructure built for crowdfunding real estate, and we almost flipped a coin on it. We could keep building on a stack we didn't believe in and create a Frankenstein, or scratch everything and start from zero. We chose to rebuild everything, which meant a year with no new clients, but it let us nail the market when we relaunched.
Was there a specific moment that convinced you to pursue full regulatory rigor rather than move faster and looser?
It happened in 2023, which I call the radical year for institutional tokenization. Before that everyone called it security token offerings, and the word securities scared people off. Then real world assets became the marketing term, fear eroded, and BlackRock deployed on native Ethereum at scale. That validation from the biggest asset owner in the world changed everything for smaller players like us.
Looking back, what decision from Brickken's first two years would you flag to another founder as mattering most?
Always be careful with your co-founders, because who you found with is like a marriage. We went through quarrels between good and bad leavers that almost killed us. Startups rarely die because of market, clients, or money, they die because of founder conflict, so pay triple attention to who you choose to build with.
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