Bed Bath & Beyond, Inc. has agreed to acquire blockchain-based investing platform Tokens.com, which will serve as the foundation for a “unified investment and personal finance platform” that the company hopes to build for homeowners.
It’s all part of newly appointed CEO Marcus Lemonis’ vision to build an integrated home ecosystem that — in addition to supplying homeowners with the products they need through its retail banners, Bed Bath & Beyond, Overstock and BuyBuy Baby — also helps homeowners finance, protect and care for their home.
Lemonis’ Vision: ‘Making Owning a Home Easier’
Lemonis laid out this vision when he took the helm of the company in early January, but work toward this goal has been underway since Lemonis first joined the company as Executive Chairman of the Board in February 2024.
“People understand the ‘Bed,’ they understand the ‘Bath,’ but even in pop culture, yes, even in movies and television, few could explain the ‘Beyond’ part of our name,” said Lemonis in a statement announcing his appointment as CEO. “‘Beyond’ means something far more than retail. It stands for our commitment to support the family, the four corners of their property and the four walls of their home. I want to make owning, living in and caring for a home easier, less expensive and more rewarding for all.”
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Bed Bath & Beyond already has been actively building out a blockchain asset portfolio, beginning with the April 2025 offering of digital tokens that allowed investors to own a piece of the IP and performance of the Overstock and BuyBuy Baby brands.
Upon launching its new franchising model for Bed Bath & Beyond stores, BB&B Inc. also announced that franchisees would have access to digital tokenization capabilities to democratize ownership of their stores and raise capitalthrough the tZero platform, in which BB&B is an investor through its Medici portfolio.
Tokens.com to Provide ‘Liquidity Pathways’ for Homeowners
TZero also will play a key role in the Tokens.com platform, which Bed Bath & Beyond expects to be operational by July 1, 2026.
The platform will aim to address what Bed Bath & Beyond described as a “fragmented market for financial services” by delivering a one-stop journey for real estate and other real-world asset finance that bridges both tokenized and traditional investing.
The idea is to give customers a clear, consolidated view of their assets and interests — including ownership structure, estimated value ranges, existing obligations and available liquidity options — so that homeowners can easily understand what they own as well as the regulated pathways available to them to access or deploy that value.
“Providing responsible, compliant liquidity pathways for homeowners and real-world asset holders is our strategy and long-term vision,” said Lemonis in a statement.
To do this, Tokens.com will offer issuer-led tokenization of qualifying public and private securities and tokenized real-world assets, alongside asset-backed financing solutions including home purchases, refinancing and home equity solutions. The platform also will allow access to a range of cryptocurrencies as a funding vector and investable asset and, over time, other tokenized and traditional assets. Tokens.com will be fully owned by Bed Bath & Beyond and as such will be integrated with the company’s other financial technology, insurance and blockchain-based businesses.
The platform will use the regulatory and operational infrastructure and platform services provided by tZero to support tokenization, custody and trading capabilities on the platform. Tokens.com also will integrate with a series of financial partners, including Figure Technologies and Figure Markets, to access mortgages, home equity lines of credit, renovation loans, home makeover loans and other asset-backed lending and capital solutions.
“With Figure’s market-leading tokenization technology and platform, Tokens.com can help unlock the trillions of U.S. home equity and crypto assets, bringing consumers liquidity and spending power,” said Michael Tannenbaum, CEO of Figure Technology Solutions in a statement.
The overarching idea is that tokenization can be “financial plumbing” that brings homeowners’ varied assets, like property, into single unified ecosystem. “Placing an asset or security on blockchain technology does not change its legal or economic nature,” explained BB&B in its acquisition announcement. “Securities remain securities, ownership rights remain intact and existing regulatory frameworks continue to apply. Tokenization is treated as infrastructure, not a new asset class.”
For customers who access liquidity through the platform, Tokens.com is expected to provide flexibility in how funds can be delivered and how investing and other financing needs can be addressed through a true multi-asset ecosystem that will utilize both cash and cryptocurrencies, including stablecoins such as YLDS, the yield-bearing stablecoin offered by Figure.
Tokens.com also will be designed with an embedded AI layer developed by ShyftLabs that will support asset analysis, eligibility assessment and certain decision orchestration actions across the platform, in order to “support informed decision-making while keeping all execution, approvals and transactions within regulated frameworks and partner systems.”
