Startup of the Week: SecondaryDAO

Bringing real estate investment on-chain, SecondaryDAO is building a compliant tokenized investment platform designed to make income-producing properties more accessible to retail investors. By combining blockchain technology with compliance built directly into its infrastructure, the company aims to remove many of the barriers that have traditionally limited access to real estate investing.

We spoke with CEO Joshua Freedman to learn more about the vision behind SecondaryDAO, the challenges of building at the intersection of real estate and blockchain, and his experience as an entrepreneur.

Tell us about your company.

Joshua: SecondaryDAO is a compliant tokenized real estate investment platform on Arbitrum. SPV-backed ERC-20s, KYC enforced in the contracts themselves, trustless rent distribution, one-wallet-one-vote governance. Registered in El Salvador under the CNAD PSAD framework. We're building the rails so retail investors anywhere can own a slice of income-producing real estate the same way they own stocks — without the regulatory landmines that have killed prior tokenization attempts.

What made you become an entrepreneur?

Joshua: I founded Freedman Capital Group in 2004 — twenty years in capital markets watching the same pattern repeat: better returns lived behind walls retail couldn't get past. Crypto rails finally let those walls come down, but only if compliance is built in from the start, not bolted on. SecondaryDAO is that bet.

What is the most challenging part of running your own startup?

Joshua: Time. There's always more to do than there are hours, and the priorities shift faster than you can plan. Picking the one thing that actually moves the needle today and ignoring the rest takes more discipline than any single technical decision.

What is the biggest challenge you have faced when looking for funding?

Joshua: Educating around compliance. Most crypto investors know the speculative side; most real-estate investors know the operational side; almost nobody is fluent in both. Getting a check-writer to see why an SPV-backed ERC-20 with on-chain KYC is fundamentally different from yet another DeFi token takes time, and time is the one thing fundraising never has enough of.

What is the most rewarding aspect of entrepreneurship?

Joshua: Watching abstractions become real. SecondaryDAO started as a thesis on a whiteboard about how compliant tokenization should work, and now it's a live system where on-chain checks run before any token moves. Every time someone looks at it and says "wait, you actually solved that?" — that's the part that keeps me at the keyboard.

Thank you Joshua for the interview! Connect with Joshua on LinkedIn: Joshua Freedman