NFTs—short for the cryptocurrency concept of non-fungible tokens—have reached the market madness level in general. But they have still been largely limited as an object of experimentation in commercial real estate. A new startup is trying to do more with the concept.

Hamilton Souther, Randall Johnson and Nathan Windsor, co-founders of the company LiquidEarth, supposedly launching in the third quarter of this year, in a guest post on Nasdaq argued for fully combining real estate with NFTs. "Global innovators have turned their attention to the real estate industry as the next NFT opportunity," they wrote. "This merger of the world's oldest and newest asset classes could very well prove to be the single biggest utility for NFTs, and also the next step in the evolution of real estate."

In CRE, interest seems to have moved mostly to tokenization that would more readily enable fractional ownership and marketing of real estate. The thought is that automating a process of letting people buy shares in a building or portfolio would mean a broader market of potential investors, which should drive up interest and prices. Tokenization and fractionalized ownership could also eventually mean greater and easier liquidity, a benefit for investors of all sizes.