Canada has committed more than C$3 million ($2.1 million) over five years to an Industrial Research Chair in Tokenization at École de technologie supérieure (ÉTS), backing work on advanced tokenization and decentralized federated learning led by Professor Kaiwen Zhang and industry partner T-RIZE Group.
The funding is provided through Mitacs and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) under the Mitacs Accelerate–NSERC Alliance Grants program, the parties said.
Established in 2024, the Chair targets infrastructure for real-world asset tokenization and blockchain sustainability, alongside distributed machine-learning methods designed to protect privacy and improve system resilience, per the announcement.
The research program centres on a patent-pending communication protocol combined with decentralized federated learning frameworks intended to cut latency and energy use, strengthen security and verifiability across distributed environments, and keep critical data flows under domestic control, according to ÉTS and T-RIZE.
Backers say the approach enables privacy-preserving collaboration and real-time risk analysis across networks, allowing institutions and market participants to evaluate exposures without centralising sensitive data.
The aim is to move tokenization from pilot projects to production-grade systems that can withstand disruptions, scale efficiently and meet compliance requirements.
Mitacs, which places graduate and post-doctoral researchers in firms to accelerate industry-academia collaboration, said the Chair aligns with Canada’s push to develop skilled talent and commercialize deep-tech research.
The program’s objectives include personalization of brand assets and participant matching, deeper analytics and reporting, and tools that give institutions and creators greater autonomy over workflow management and delivery.
T-RIZE said it is working with the Chair to turn research outputs into deployable components for institutions.
Its platform is built to structure and tokenize assets such as real estate, digital bonds, and high-quality carbon credits, operating across public and privacy-enabled networks, including the Canton Network.
The company said it can integrate insurance and digital ratings to make products collateral-ready and distribute them through regulated broker-dealers.
According to T-RIZE, it has tokenized more than $100 million in assets to date, with about $1 billion in signed projects advancing within a pipeline exceeding $5 billion.
Access to the platform’s institutional ecosystem is provided via the RIZE utility token, the company said.