At a construction site in Essex, 19-year-old Mayowa Adeosun watched men work on steel and concrete. To the casual eye, the building above looked like an accomplishment, but he saw it differently.
“Buildings aren’t built out of some grand vision,” he says. “They rise from an invisible foundation. All structures start underground, in parts that no one takes pictures of or celebrates.”
These early lessons laid the foundation for Assetrix, a Nigerian proptech startup he launched this year to reimagine real estate investing with transparency, compliance, and digital innovation.
While most platforms chase headlines with flashy launches and high-profile projects, Adeosun focuses on intangible but important factors such as verifiable systems, regulatory compliance, and milestone-based fund management.
“Foundation work is boring by definition, but if you miss a step, the entire structure becomes unstable. That patience, that willingness to do the invisible work properly, is what we apply to building trust infrastructure for real estate in Africa,” he said.
From construction to compliance
The journey from construction sites in Essex to fintech and eventually proptech may seem like a circuitous journey, but for Adeosun, the lessons are cumulative.
Prior to joining Assettrix, he learned the fundamentals of African fintech and mastered trust and compliance at Sycamore, the investment and savings platform he co-founded.
“The opacity in real estate is not cultural, it’s structural,” he explains. “At Sycamore, we learned that people don’t trust financial services because they’re inherently skeptical; they don’t trust financial services because the system doesn’t give them visibility into what’s happening to their money,” he said.
“The same is true for real estate, only the timeline is slower. If discrete investors can’t see the progress of construction, it’s not a cultural issue, it’s an infrastructure issue. There is literally no system to tell you what’s happening to the capital between the day you send the money and the date the building is scheduled to be completed.”
Mr. Adeosun realized that by applying fintech principles, transaction visibility, milestone verification, and transparent accountability, he could address the long-standing opacity in the real estate industry.
Overcoming Nigeria’s real estate crisis
Nigeria’s real estate market is notorious for a 70% project stall rate, but Adeosun sees this statistic as a symptom of systemic misalignment rather than an uncontrollable cultural phenomenon.
“Fraud is a symptom, not a disease,” he says. “Developers collect deposits upfront with no obligation to prove progress. If a project stalls, investors have no recourse. Banks charge interest rates that make completion impossible, and there is no neutral third party to ensure accountability.”
Assettrix addresses this with milestone-based fund releases. Developers will only access capital if they achieve verified construction milestones.
By doing so, the company essentially builds a trust infrastructure under a visible real estate environment, making projects far less likely to stall and investor confidence more visible.
Democratization of real estate investment
Assetrix opened with a minimum investment of $500, a radical act of financial democratization. But with accessibility comes responsibility.
“The biggest risk is creating expectations that cannot be met. Real estate returns take years and construction delays occur even in well-managed projects,” admits Adeosun.
To alleviate this, Assetrix started with 170 founding members who understood that the model was experimental.
By managing investor expectations and implementing disciplined deployments, Assetrix balances aggressive scaling with sustainable reliability, ensuring early backers experience solid returns before the floodgates open.
Unleash the capital of the diaspora
For Adeosun, Assetrix is a vehicle for economic transformation. Nigeria receives approximately $20 billion in remittances annually from the diaspora, most of which is spent on cash. Mr. Adeosun believes that if real estate operations are transparent and trustworthy, a large portion of these funds can be attracted into productive investment.
“Capital flows where it is trusted. Currently, in the absence of reliable investment channels, discrete remittances are funding consumption. If real estate can prove to be transparent and accessible, the same logic applies to agriculture, manufacturing and infrastructure,” he says.
Its influence extends far beyond Nigeria. Across Africa, billions of dollars in remittances could be channeled into productive investments, fostering entrepreneurship and infrastructure growth across the continent.
Adeosun is clear about what this means for discrete investors. “A nurse from Houston logs into Assetrix over lunch. She owns fractional shares in three properties in Lagos. A shortlet in Lekki generates $200 a month, a commercial space in Victoria Island returns $450, and a residential development in Ikoyi has appreciated by 15% this year.”
“She tracks construction progress, sells tokens on the secondary market within 48 hours, and uses the proceeds to fund her nephew’s college education.”
This, he argues, is what true financial independence looks like. It’s the ability to address national growth from anywhere, backed by transparent, liquid and reliable capital.
However, tokenized real estate ownership remains a legal gray area in many African countries. Adeosun emphasizes the importance of a clear legal framework to protect fractional investors. Without it, institutional investors will remain hesitant and discrete funds will continue to flow primarily into consumption rather than investment.
Assetrix’s most important metric is repeat investment behavior, not just closed trades. “Anyone can complete one deal. The question is, after the first project turns a profit, will the investors reinvest? Will they bring in other projects?” he asked.
Repeated engagement validates both the platform’s infrastructure and its psychological credibility, indicating its readiness for expansion across the country and continent.
Blockchain as a verification tool
While technology plays a central role in Assetrix’s strategy, Adeosun is quick to clarify that blockchain will not magically dismantle entrenched power relationships.
“It’s about redistributing information, not power,” he says. Traditionally, developers controlled all information about the progress of a project. Investors could only rely on the developer’s word, creating a fundamental asymmetry.
Blockchain allows everyone from a developer in Lagos to a discrete investor in Houston to see the same verified progress in real time. Funds will only be released if milestones are achieved.
However, Adeosun emphasizes an important caveat. “Code handles transparency beautifully, but code cannot determine whether the quality of the work is up to par or whether delays are justified. That’s why we combine blockchain with Sycamore’s SEC-cleared oversight. Code handles the transparency layer, and experts handle the judgment layer. We need both.”
It is this combination of constant transparency and expert oversight that makes Assetrix stand out in Africa’s nascent proptech ecosystem.
Adeosun said this transparency and professionalism extends to regulatory compliance and is key to ensuring oversight of SEC authorization. “We’re dealing with people’s savings, not testing social media features,” he said. “Reliability can’t be retrofitted. You either build it into the foundation or you don’t have it.”
This regulatory discipline creates a long-term competitive moat. Competitors who scale first and deal with compliance later are bound to run into barriers that Assetrix has already cleared.
Cross-border real estate portfolio
Looking ahead, Assetrix plans to create a cross-border African real estate portfolio on a single platform
Mr Adeosun said Kenyan investors could own real estate in Lagos, Accra, Johannesburg and Kigali through a unified interface and manage it like a stock portfolio. Differences in legal systems, currencies, and trust frameworks are no longer barriers.
Ultimately, we have confidence that all investors, whether in Houston or Lagos, can be confident that their foundations are solid. According to Adeosun, this is an intangible initiative that will ultimately support the next generation of wealth creation on the continent.
