by MTHULISI SIBANDA
JOHANNESBURG, (CAJ News) – AFRIVEST and the Traditional Leaders of Southern Africa (TLSA) have signed a Master Tokenisation Partnership Agreement.
The agreement sets the framework under which assets held by, and on behalf of, traditional communities can be structured, verified and issued as regulated digital instruments.
This follows recognition that Southern Africa’s traditional communities hold assets of significant economic value but have seldom had access to markets that determine the value of such assets elsewhere in the world.
Those markets were not designed around communal ownership and typically assume a corporate structure, audit history and settlement infrastructure that community institutions were never positioned to provide.
Officials said tokenisation changes the mechanics of that challenge rather than its underlying principle, as an asset is verified, valued and represented as a digital instrument that can be issued, held, transferred and settled under the same compliance obligations governing regulated financial products.
King Ramatlhare Pilane, President of TLSA, signed the agreement alongside Gideon van der Schyff, Chief Executive Officer of the Traditional Leaders Technology Agency, and Duane Herholdt, Chief Executive Officer of Damrev.
AfriVest operates as the specialised African tokenisation arm of the Damrev Group.
“This begins from a position of respect,” Herholdt said.
“Traditional leadership has stewarded these assets for generations.”
Herholdt said their role was not to reinterpret that stewardship but to provide it with an instrument through which global capital could transact, while ensuring that the communities to whom the assets belong understood what they were holding.
“We have built the regulated infrastructure. TLSA brings the mandate and the assets. The work now is to prove the model properly, on the ground, one issuance at a time,” he said.
Van der Schyff said, “We did not sign this quickly. Our team went through the architecture, the security posture, the audit trail, the recovery position, and the question of who owns what. We asked for a great deal of detail before we were satisfied.”
He said they found a platform where the compliance work had already been completed rather than merely promised.
“Our data remains ours, and the record cannot be altered after the fact. Those two answers weighed more with us than anything else in the document,” van der Schyff said.
Damrev builds programmable financial infrastructure for tokenised assets.
– CAJ News