In a statement posted to social media platform X, General Partner at VanEck Ventures Wyatt Lonergan and Partner Juan Lopez announced the firm’s investment in Manifest, a platform bringing American real estate into decentralized finance (DeFi).
Manifest, which is “launching soon” according to its website, offers a “tokenized ETF” $USH (U.S. Housing) backed by home equity investments (HEIs).
“Manifest is actually pioneering a new kind of tokenization in our view by applying ETF-style diversification to U.S. real estate and packaging it as a smart contract available across public blockchains,” Lopez told etf.com. “Unlike conventional ETFs trading on legacy exchanges, $USH brings the benefits of blockchain—liquidity, programmability and global accessibility—to real estate exposure in a way that hasn’t been done before.”
What’s most important about today’s announcement for ETF investors is that there will soon be an option to invest in diversified U.S. real estate that is not tied to real estate investment trusts (REITs) or direct ownership, Manifest Founder and CEO Nathaniel Sokoll-Ward told etf.com.
He added that instead of using a product like the Vanguard Real Estate ETF (VNQ), where the assets are predominantly real estate rental businesses, investors will have “the option to gain capital-efficient, direct exposure to the dominant real estate asset class in the country: owner-occupied single-family residential real estate equity.”
“Manifest’s $USH represents a significant evolution beyond traditional real estate ETFs. By leveraging blockchain technology, $USH enhances liquidity, capital efficiency and tax advantages,” Sokoll-Ward said. “Unlike publicly traded REIT ETFs—subject to stock market volatility, centralized management, limited trading hours and high fees—$USH is fully on-chain and backed by Home Equity Investments.”
He added that this structure “eliminates intermediaries, reduces fees, increases transparency and ensures that all assets are fully collateralized by real estate equity.”
VanEck Ventures, which co-led Manifest’s $2.5 million pre-seed funding round with Lattice Fund, was launched by the fund giant last October.
The $30 million early-stage fund marked VanEck’s expansion into venture capital and was created to invest in “visionary founders operating at the intersection of fintech, digital assets and artificial intelligence.”
“Tokenized financial products like $USH represent the natural next step in asset management. They introduce 24/7 liquidity, seamless global settlement and accessibility, and direct programmability,” Lopez said. “These are the features that bolstered growth in DeFi and stablecoins over the past few years, which traditional ETFs simply do not have. A developer can’t easily access this type of asset and build a product that enables margin against it, for example. Now they can.”
