MQube has announced that it has now tokenised £1.3bn of mortgage debt on the blockchain.

The mortgage fintech group said that this tokenisation of mortgage assets via an ethereum virtual machine (EVM) would see MPowered, the lending arm of MQube, become the first lender in Europe to have its mortgage debt tokenised on-chain.

The tokenisation of assets involves converting tangible or intangible assets such as real estate or art into digital tokens which are then recorded on a secure decentralised and immutable blockchain ledger or digital registry.

While stock, bonds and real estate have previously been tokenised, this is the first time mortgage debt has been brought onto the blockchain in Europe, which MQube said marks a “significant shift” for the mortgage industry and broader financial services industry.

MQube also suggested that if more lenders were to tokenise their assets on the blockchain, it could “open up a whole new world for banks and building societies”.

CEO of MQube, Stuart Cheetham, commented: “The benefits of tokenising mortgage debt right now, is that it allows mortgage lenders to achieve data integrity, transaction security and audit traceability but once the necessary regulatory and operational framework is in place, and there is still a huge amount of work to be done here, the opportunity for the mortgage lending industry is huge.

“The plethora of benefits include the ability to transfer assets from one lender to another cutting out legal process in a remortgage case and saving thousands of pounds per remortgage transaction. Most importantly, however, the tokenisation of mortgage debt, paves the way for a brand-new mortgage securitisation market via the blockchain which involves the pooling of mortgage debt into a tradable and investable mortgage security.”

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