The Trump Organization and London-based luxury real estate developer DAR Global have announced a new hotel development known as Trump International Hotel Maldives, which will apparently be tokenized on a yet-to-be-announced blockchain. According to a press release associated with the announcement, this will be the first such tokenization of a real estate project that is still in development.

Crypto-related activities of Trump-affiliated companies have undergone a massive expansion over the past couple of years with the launch of World Liberty Financial, the TRUMP memecoin, Trump’s non-fungible token (NFT) collections, and more. The recent pardon of former Binance CEO Changpeng “CZ†Zhao and potential conflicts of interest associated with the TRUMP memecoin are two examples of how Trump has been more focused on his own crypto-related profiteering than embracing the decentralization principles of Bitcoin in the first year of his second term as U.S. President.

Hah. You’re not wrong. It depends on what level of fraud you’re aiming to commit: an actual blockchain deployed for a dumb reason (technical fraud), or just tell them it’s blockchain when it’s not (social fraud??). Or a more charitable interpretation is that it’s not fraud if…

— Bryan Bishop (@kanzure) November 9, 2025

The crypto industry, including large exchanges interested in listing dubious, unregistered investments on their platforms, threw large amounts of money at the Trump presidential campaign before the Republican candidate’s victory, which has led to a situation where financial crime is largely percieved as effectively legal, as long as its conducted on a blockchain (or as long as the word blockchain is used in marketing materials at the very least).

While bitcoin is slowly developing into a trusted store of value for the digital age (see recent embraces from the Harvard University endowment or the Czech Republic’s central bank), use cases for blockchain technology outside of Satoshi Nakamoto’s original invention remain unclear. Indeed, much of crypto, whether it be stablecoins like USDC or blockchains like Coinbase’s Base blockchain, involves the use of decentralization theater for the purposes of simply avoiding financial regulation.

Notably, the Trump-affiliated tokenized hotel announcement comes at a time when former SEC Chief of Staff Amanda Fischer has been sparring with crypto bros over some of these very points on X. For example, Fischer pointed to previous SEC guidance regarding the application of existing securities laws to newly-issued crypto tokens as an indication that the crypto industry should be more upset with the reality of existing laws than they are with the SEC.

The SEC released 18 pgs of guidance in 2017 – during the first Trump term – about how DAOs can fall within the securities laws. This is the guidance you claim doesn’t exist. Not liking it or thinking laws are for suckers is not the same as lack of clarityhttps://t.co/2q6TXRL2u6 https://t.co/E0fP7p9xXe

— Amanda Fischer (@amandalfischer) November 14, 2025

What Does Tokenization Even Mean at This Point?

“Tokenization,†which has been touted as the next big thing in financial technology by everyone from Robinhood’s Vlad Tenev to BlackRock’s Larry Fink, is basically the drop-in replacement buzzword for “blockchain technology,†which was the key talking point of fintech gurus in earlier times. While the reasons for tokenization potentially make sense for marketing purposes or simply avoiding regulation, the benefits of tokenizing centralized assets on top of decentralized blockchains remain unclear.

Ever since @kyletorpey said that “Ethereum/DeFi not Bitcoin†was this cycle’s “Blockchain not Bitcoin†I can’t get the analogy out of my head. A lot there.

— Joe Weisenthal (@TheStalwart) May 23, 2021

While Satoshi discussed the benefits of a decentralized monetary and financial system for things like removing trust from monetary policy and enabling censorship-resistant online payments, a lot of that goes out the window when you are doing things like tokenizing a centrally-managed real estate development or building dollar-denominated payment rails on blockchain platforms that are themselves becoming increasingly centralized at the base layer, as illustrated during the recent Amazon Web Services downtime.

At this point, it’s unclear what tokenization even means. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong recently touted the tokenization of dollar deposits on Coinbase’s Base blockchain by JPMorgan Chase. It’s unclear what is revolutionary about a bank issuing dollars on a blockchain that is effectively owned and operated by a financial institution like Coinbase.

Coinbase has stated its intention to further decentralize Base over time, but that remains to be seen. For now, they’re also looking into issuing a token for their blockchain, despite the fact that it is currently operating fine without one.

Coinbase is also launching its own version of initial coin offerings, which were largely used to launch fraudulent crypto projects in 2017 and 2018. However, Coinbase says it is implementing additional requirements for token issuers and protections for investors this time around.

Due to the increasingly centralized nature of these platforms, it’s clear that regulatory arbitrage is the goal here rather than truly decentralized finance (DeFi). Of course, those who are a bit more blunt with their description of what’s going on here simply refer to this as “crime season†with a half-serious and half-joking tone, as Blockworks Editor David Canellis has done on X.

4/ There have been TWO major crime seasons in crypto in the past decade.

Season 1 started when best crypto ponzi BitConnect launched in Feb 2018

It ran until April 2018, when the Feds came for Centra. QuadrigaCX founder Gerald Cotten disappeared around eight months later pic.twitter.com/RsesTTxBQR

— David Canellis (@dcanellis) February 4, 2025

Going forward, it makes sense to track the developments associated with the Clarity Act, which would clarify the regulatory structure of this sort of crypto activity going forward.