Nasdaq NewGenIVF taps Hong Kong for first UAE real estate backed tokenized bond

January 25, 2026

By Joe Pan

Evident underwrites multiple “firsts” in landmark tokenized bond deal of the year

When Nasdaq-listed healthcare and assisted reproductive technology provider NewGenIVF (NASDAQ: NIVF) pivots to fund a UAE real estate venture with a tokenized bond, it chose Hong Kong-based Evident Capital, a SFC-licensed investment platform focused on tokenized alternative assets, to launch a string of tokenized fixed income firsts, including the first bond by a US-listed company to be tokenized and issued in Hong Kong, and the first casino-related real estate-backed bond issuance in Hong Kong to finance a project near the first Gulf casino.

In an exclusive interview with the launching team, Blockwind News spoke to Florian Spiegl, founder and CEO of Evident; Daniel Siu, director of business development at NewGenIVF Group and Joshua Chu, NewGenIVF senior counsel.

This will be the first time a UAE real estate project, one of the residential complexes adjacent to the Wynn casino development in Ras Al Khaimah, is financed through a tokenized bond that originated and distributed out of Hong Kong’s digital asset ecosystem. It is also Evident’s first tokenized bond underwriting of the year and one of the earliest deals where a U.S. Nasdaq listco uses Hong Kong as its base to tap private wealth and on-chain investors for yield-bearing real estate credit.

From IVF labs to UAE towers

NewGenIVF’s core business is still the rather more prosaic world of assisted reproductive technology and healthcare, with clinics and operations across multiple markets. But as director of business development Daniel Siu explains, the listed group has added a “NewGen Digital” arm to drive treasury and capital-markets innovation on top of its healthcare and property activities.

“One of the key reasons for our strategic shift is that we see a real first-mover opportunity to use tokenization as a way to diversify our capital base, from traditional Wall Street-style wealth through to a new generation of crypto investors,” said Alfred Siu, Chief Executive Officer of NewGenIVF Group, in an written response to Blockwind News.

The group’s UAE adventure began as a straightforward market expansion for its IVF business before veering into real estate. Through local partners and agents, NewGen ended up co-developing a residential project roughly 10 to 15 minutes’ drive from the Wynn-branded casino site in Ras Al Khaimah, betting that long-term demand for homes around the Arab world’s first casino will look a lot like the playbook seen in Macau and Singapore.

Why a tokenized bond, not fractional property (yet)

Despite the Vegas-style backdrop, the first product is not a fractionalized property token but a traditional bond structure wrapped in digital rails. The issuance is backed by NewGen IVF as a corporate issuer – not by slicing up the title deed – a deliberate choice driven by regulatory pragmatism across jurisdictions.

“Partnering with an advanced platform like Evident, which has been trusted on high-profile mandates involving global names such as Bytedance and a major aerospace and space-transportation player, is not only deeply encouraging for us as an issuer; earning a place alongside these giants underscores our own conviction in the quality of our real estate and virtual asset projects, and signals to the market that they are ready for an increasingly institutional audience,” Alfred Siu added.

From sandboxes to real distribution

For Evident founder and CEO Florian Spiegl, the deal is a culmination of years spent moving tokenization from white papers to real-world debt. He notes that in Hong Kong “the first set of tokenised bond series came out with the green bonds by the HKMA at the very beginning,” followed by pilots and bank deals, but “this is really the first time where we have a number of historic firsts” bundled into one transaction.

Spiegl sees the project as emblematic of a broader shift away from experiments and into private-market distribution. “Last year it was all about, we go into tokenize, we have these plans and the big announcements,” he says. “I predict that this year it will be all about where is the distribution – where are the investors and where’s the liquidity.” In his view, the demand is clearest among private-wealth investors looking for asset-backed, risk-off yield they can subscribe to from their phones, not a banker’s PDF.

Rules, not loopholes

On the legal side, NewGen senior counsel and co-chair of the Hong Kong Web3 Association, Joshua Chu stresses that tokenization is a technology wrapper, not a way to rewrite property law. “People only got in trouble with RWA tokenization because they don’t really understand the term, when they basically come up with something way too creative that doesn’t fit with the traditional model,” he says.

Chu points out that Hong Kong already has “very clear securities laws” and that the safer path is to treat on-chain instruments that look like securities as securities—with full compliance and disclosure—rather than trying to make tokens directly represent title deeds in jurisdictions that do not allow fractional real estate ownership.

“Technology is not a way for you to circumvent or change the very nature of the law that relates to the particular assets,” he says. “Tokenized bonds, when underpinned by rigorous legal, regulatory and governance frameworks, can genuinely bridge traditional finance and Web3 by improving transparency, access and execution while safeguarding investors.”

Five years of tokenized bonds: from pilots to private deals

The NewGen–Evident transaction sits on top of a growing stack of tokenized bond experiments and issuances in Hong Kong and beyond, from central‑bank pilots to commercial bank offerings.

Outlook: patient capital, tokenized rails

Looking ahead, Daniel Siu expects all major projects to have a digital-finance component, but insists the group will stay anchored in its core healthcare and real-asset businesses. “If we’re able to harness the excitement in digital finance responsibly, we can open our projects to new communities of investors without changing who we are as a company,” he says.

Spiegl, for his part, thinks 2026 will be about scaling distribution and liquidity for high-quality assets, not seeing how many acronyms the industry can mint. “You can tokenize many things as we know, but there’s still a difference between bad and good assets that does not change with all the tokenization,” he says. “We’re hyper-focused on the quality of the underlying assets.” If NewGen’s casino-adjacent bond performs, expect more listcos to follow – not because it is shiny and on-chain, but because it quietly pays in both coupons and lessons for the next wave of RWA tokenization.

About the AuthorJoe Pan is an editor and producer at Blockwind News.  An early adopter of blockchain technology, he has covered major crypto conferences globally since 2019 and moderated Web3 events across Asia. Joe is part of the founding team of Blockwind News and teaches Asia’s first Master of Journalism course on “Covering Cryptocurrency and Blockchain” at Hong Kong Baptist University.