The problem with tokenizing real estate has never really been the tokenization itself. It's what happens after—when early investors wake up one morning and wonder how, exactly, they're supposed to turn their digital property shares back into cash.
John-Paul Matenga's Ndarama platform is now trying to solve that. The Zimbabwean startup, which operates under regulatory sandbox approval from the country's Securities and Exchange Commission, has quietly rolled out a secondary trading market. Investors who bought fractional property tokens—priced as low as $1—can now list them for resale to other verified users on the platform. Someone might buy in at a dollar, then flip their position at $1.20, or whatever price the market will bear.
It's the kind of infrastructure that sounds almost pedestrian until you step back and consider what it means in a market where liquidity is often theoretical.
The Mechanics, Such As They Are
The system operates on a willing-buyer, willing-seller model—peer-to-peer trading contained within Ndarama's ecosystem. Company materials and scattered founder comments on Reddit sketch out the basics. Users list tokens for resale at prices they determine themselves. A LinkedIn post from someone on the Ndarama team offered a glimpse: "Watch how Paul used the Ndarama Secondary Market to get USD$400 while keeping his 500 tokens."
Whether "Paul" represents an actual user or an illustrative example remains unclear—promotional materials in emerging fintech markets don't always distinguish sharply between the two.
The trading itself sits alongside Ndarama's flagship property offering, Graylands Park, in the site's navigation. Everything stays within the platform's walls. Ndarama operates under SECZim's sandbox framework as both a Collective Investment Scheme and a Virtual Asset Service Provider, designations created under Zimbabwe's Finance Act 2025. The company's compliance page states that sandbox approval arrived on February 5, 2026, though specific launch timelines have varied in different announcements.
Kreston Zimbabwe Trustees—licensed by SECZim in February 2024—holds investor funds and property title deeds separately from platform operations, at least in theory providing a custody buffer between users and Ndarama itself.
Why Liquidity Keeps Everyone Up at Night
Ndarama's secondary market arrives as liquidity has crystallized into the defining challenge for real-world asset tokenization more broadly. A research paper published on arXiv in mid-2026 examined this tension head-on: many tokenized assets, despite blockchain's supposed 24/7 tradability, exhibited disappointingly thin secondary markets. The researchers found that tokenization alone guarantees nothing—platform design and market-making mechanisms prove critical to actual liquidity.
Zimbabwe's regulators seem aware of this. In early 2026, another entity—FINSEC—secured its own SECZim sandbox approval for an Asset Tokenisation Market covering everything from origination through trading, settlement, and custody. Property was identified as the first asset class, suggesting the country is building broader infrastructure for secondary trading beyond what any single startup can provide.
It's an ambitious regulatory posture for a market still finding its footing.
Mobile Money Meets Blockchain (Sort Of)
What distinguishes Ndarama from parallel experiments elsewhere is its deliberate fusion of tokenized securities with Zimbabwe's extensive mobile money infrastructure. Users buy fractional tokens representing claims on property cashflows and rights. Those tokens can then serve as collateral for USD loans, disbursed through EcoCash, OneMoney, or direct bank transfer. According to January 2026 coverage in Equity Axis citing company materials, target APRs range from 48% to 120%—steep by developed-market standards but positioned below Zimbabwe's informal lending channels.
Users never touch crypto wallets. Ndarama handles blockchain operations on the backend while presenting an interface built for a population fluent in mobile money, not MetaMask. It's a pragmatic design choice in a market where EcoCash penetration far outstrips crypto literacy.
Now the secondary market adds an exit option. Instead of waiting indefinitely for property-backed distributions or using tokens purely as loan collateral, investors can liquidate positions to other users. In theory, anyway. Whether sufficient buyer interest materializes remains an open question.
The Sandbox as Laboratory
Ndarama Standard (Pvt) Ltd—registered as company number 21344/2022—operates this experiment under regular regulatory scrutiny. The SECZim sandbox imposes ongoing reporting requirements and periodic feature reviews, giving regulators real-time visibility into how tokenized property securities perform outside controlled environments.
Early coverage mentioned professional asset management from Stratus Capital Partners, though independent confirmation of this relationship remains elusive. A VC4A listing describes a $50,000 pilot launching with $1 tokens, but no formal venture funding round has been publicly disclosed. The platform charges a 3% fee on projects, according to website snippets, though comprehensive fee structures aren't readily available.
Matenga, who previously founded YouFarm Africa and worked as a software engineering consultant, framed Ndarama's mission around financial inclusion in commentary earlier this year. The platform describes itself as "Zimbabwe's first SECZim-approved tokenized securities platform"—a claim that's both true and slightly beside the point, given how nascent this entire market segment remains.
How It Stacks Up
Parallels to more established markets illuminate just how frontier this territory is. Securitize operates a regulated alternative trading system for digital securities in the United States. BRIX Exchange runs a private real asset exchange targeting accredited investors. RealPort offers secondary market functionality in Europe. Dubai Land Department piloted controlled secondary trading for tokenized real estate in early 2026.
Ndarama's innovation isn't technological breakthroughs—it's adaptation. Taking secondary market concepts that exist elsewhere and retrofitting them to Zimbabwe's regulatory framework, mobile money infrastructure, and investment culture. That's perhaps harder than it sounds.
The academic literature, such as it is, suggests that simply offering trading functionality doesn't guarantee liquidity. Market-making mechanisms matter. So does critical mass. Ndarama's peer-to-peer model, where users set their own bid-ask spreads without intermediary support, depends entirely on organic buyer interest developing among verified participants. That's a question of network effects and trust—variables that don't respond well to platform design alone.
What Comes Next, Maybe
For now, the infrastructure exists. An investor holding property-backed tokens purchased at launch has, at least notionally, an exit besides waiting for distributions or borrowing against their position. In markets where traditional property investment demands significant capital and illiquidity is simply assumed, that represents movement.
Whether it represents progress will depend on messier questions. Do enough buyers show up? Do spreads narrow or widen? Does pricing reflect underlying property fundamentals or platform-specific dynamics? And perhaps most critically: can a secondary market built on peer-to-peer mechanics achieve anything resembling depth without professional market makers stepping in?
Zimbabwe's regulatory sandbox offers a controlled environment to answer those questions. But controlled environments have a way of obscuring risks that emerge only at scale. For investors putting dollars—even small ones—into fractional property tokens, the secondary market is less a finish line than a starting point. The real test comes when someone actually needs their money back, and discovers whether liquidity on paper translates to cash in their EcoCash wallet.
That's when theory meets friction. And in frontier markets, friction always wins the first round.
