Matthieu Merchadou: Building the Digital Infrastructure for the Future of Real Estate

Real estate is the world’s largest asset class and one of the least disciplined in how it handles data.

Critical information about buildings is fragmented across PDFs, emails, contractor folders, legacy software, and disconnected systems. As assets move from design to construction to operations, data is lost, altered, or rendered unverifiable. Owners, lenders, insurers, and cities are forced to make decisions based on partial truth.

Smart-city initiatives struggle for the same reason: no shared, trusted digital foundation.

For more than two decades, Matthieu Merchadou has worked inside this reality, as a financier, an asset owner, an operator, and ultimately as a builder of digital infrastructure designed to fix it.

As Co-Founder & CEO of Magma, he is leading a global effort to give every building a verifiable digital identity through the Digital Twin Token (DTT®): a new standard for real-estate data, governance, and finance.

This is not a story about tokenization.
It is about restoring discipline to how real estate is digitized, governed, and financed.

A Cross-Industry Profile: Finance → Real Estate → Smart Cities → Web3

Matthieu’s career spans over 20 years across three continents.

Finance & Capital Markets

Matthieu began his career in finance at PaineWebber and UBS, working in capital markets and investment advisory. During the first wave of the Internet and the dot-com era, he focused on NASDAQ equity analysis and portfolio construction for small and mid-sized institutions.

These years formed a foundational understanding of:

• How securities behave
• How leverage amplifies both upside and risk
• Why trust, disclosure, and governance are non-negotiable in capital markets

Later, at UBS France, he transitioned into real estate advisory, guiding high-net-worth individuals and institutions on real-estate allocation — before leaving to create his own investment company.

This early exposure to regulated finance deeply shaped his thinking: capital follows structure, not narratives.

Real Estate Development & Asset Management 

In 2003, Matthieu founded Meridian Invest, overseeing more than $300M in real-estate development and asset-management projects between Paris and Miami.

Operating across acquisitions, redevelopment, financing, and long-term ownership, he repeatedly encountered the same structural failure:

Every stakeholder works from a different version of the same building.

Architects, contractors, property managers, lenders, insurers, and owners all rely on fragmented and inconsistent data. As assets move through their lifecycle, information degrades. The result is operational inefficiency, inflated costs, disputes, and mispriced risk.

This fragmentation is not accidental, it is structural.
And it is incompatible with modern finance, ESG requirements, and smart-city governance.

This insight became the foundation for Magma.

Smart Cities & Urban Infrastructure

In 2017, following the redevelopment of multiple assets in Greater Downtown Miami, Matthieu recognized that real estate was entering an unavoidable transformation, driven by platform economics, digital twins, IoT, and blockchain.

Together with Cooper Copetas, a parametric architect working at the intersection of BIM and urban systems, he initiated the digitization of a portfolio of 40 buildings in Downtown Miami.

What began as an asset-level initiative quickly revealed a larger opportunity:
buildings could serve as the base layer of city-scale digital infrastructure.

This led to the creation of NOOS Labs, a smart-city innovation hub focused on urban infrastructure, logistics, blockchain, and data-driven planning, and to the launch of The Miami Beta City Project, a long-term initiative designed to establish a foundational digital infrastructure for city governance and operations.

During this period, Matthieu became deeply involved in civic innovation:

• Co-Chair of Innovation at the Miami-Dade Beacon Council
• Founder of the Florida Blockchain Foundation, a coalition of public institutions, universities, and private actors
• Contributor to Miami’s early smart-city and blockchain strategy

In 2018, this work was recognized with the Keys to Miami-Dade County.

Magma and the Creation of the Digital Twin Token (DTT®)

Magma was founded with a clear premise: A building should have a digital identity as reliable as a passport.

The Digital Twin Token (DTT®) is Magma’s answer.

It unifies:

• Legal and technical documentation
• BIM and 3D models
• IoT and operational data
• Inspections, permits, maintenance, and lifecycle records

Into a living, verifiable digital identity, anchored on-chain, auditable over time, and interoperable across stakeholders, while preserving confidentiality through cryptographic controls.

But the real breakthrough of the DTT® is not technical.

It is architectural.

This Is Bigger Than Tokenization

Tokenization alone is not innovation.

Tokenization without verified data is leverage without discipline, the very condition that has historically amplified risk in real estate and financial markets.

The DTT® was created to reverse this logic.

It enforces a strict sequence:

1. Verified data
   Building data is validated, structured, versioned, and auditable across the full lifecycle of the asset.
2. Governance
   Rights, responsibilities, access controls, compliance rules, and accountability are embedded directly into the asset’s digital identity.
3. Finance
   Only once data and governance are trusted can ownership be structured, cash flows financed, and risk priced correctly.

Once a building has a trusted digital identity:

• Ownership can be structured
• Cash flows can be financed
• Retrofits can be funded based on performance
• Infrastructure can become self-financing
• Cities can plan with real-time visibility

This is not about trading buildings faster.

It is about turning real estate into programmable, finance-ready infrastructure.

Why Matthieu Is Uniquely Positioned to Build This

The DTT® could not have been designed by a pure technologist nor by a traditional real-estate operator.

It required someone who has operated across banking, asset ownership, property management, and urban systems.

1. Matthieu Merchadou has:
   • Worked inside regulated capital markets
   • Managed real assets over decades
   • Dealt with property operations and lifecycle accountability
   • Built technology that respects regulatory, financial, and operational constraints

   Most technologists underestimate real estate.
   Most real-estate professionals underestimate technology.
   Most tokenization projects underestimate governance.

   The DTT® exists because Matthieu has experienced failure modes on all sides of the system and designed infrastructure to prevent them.

   Magma is not a marketplace.
   Not a speculative protocol.
   Not a short-term financial product.

   It is infrastructure for buildings, cities, and capital.

A Global, Institutional Vision

Magma is deliberately positioned across three regions shaping the future of urban infrastructure:

• United States: market-driven innovation and smart-city deployment
• Europe: regulatory rigor, ESG compliance, and digital governance
• GCC: sovereign digital infrastructure and next-generation urban development

This global footprint reflects a simple belief:
The next generation of real estate will be data-first, governed, and finance-ready.

Conclusion: A Founder Shaping the Digital Future of Real Estate

Matthieu Merchadou is not building hype.
He is building order.

Through Magma and the Digital Twin Token, he is laying the groundwork for a world where:

• Buildings generate trusted data
• Cities operate with real-time visibility
• Capital flows with discipline

This is not transformation for its own sake.

It is the modernization of an industry that can no longer afford opacity.