Tokening Real Estate: The Race to Own the Future of Property is On

Dubai has taken a big step toward its trillion-dollar real estate tokenization plan.

Last week, the Dubai Land Department (DLD) and Ctrl Alt, a tokenization infrastructure provider, introduit secondary market trading capabilities for tokenized real estate assets, marking the launch of Phase Two of Dubai’s Projet de tokenisation immobilière Pilot.

With this secondary market for property-backed tokens, DLD and Ctrl Alt are enabling the resale of over $5 million worth of real estate tokens, thus allowing for fractional property ownership.

This phase builds on the successful pilot stage, during which ten Dubai properties were tokenized, representing AED 18.5 million in real estate value.

Close to 8 million tokens were issued at that stage, which are now eligible for resale in a controlled environment. This move will expand investor accessibility across the realty sector of Dubai, which has been experiencing a boom, reaching a record Dh916 billion (over $249 billion USD) in total property transactions in 2025.

Trading will occur within a regulated framework on the project’s distribution platform to ensure transaction integrity.

For this project, Ctrl Alt has chosen the XRP Ledger blockchain, which recently activé a new upgrade that enables regulated entities to operate gated decentralized exchanges (DEXs). All transactions will be executed and recorded on the XRP Ledger, with all funds secured by Ripple Custody.

“We’re proud to work with the Dubai Land Department and VARA on Phase Two of the project, demonstrating what is possible when governments and institutional-grade innovation come together to build market-leading digital rails,” said Robert Farquhar, CEO, MENA at Ctrl Alt. “Native tokenization only reaches its full potential when assets can move efficiently post-issuance, and secondary market trading is essential to that outcome.”

With this effort, Dubai aims to become a global hub for real estate tokenization, the process of converting the ownership rights of a physical property into digital tokens that can be bought, sold, and traded on a blockchain platform. By representing a fractional stake in the property, each token significantly lowers the barrier to entry.

The minimum investment is pretty low here compared to traditional real estate investments, thus opening the market to a wider range of investors and, in turn, increasing liquidity, making it easier to enter and exit investments, even at any time of day or week.

The decentralized, immutable, and borderless Technologie blockchain, meanwhile, provides a transparent and secure way to record ownership and transactions, thus streamlining records and settlement. By eliminating intermediaries, the technology enables faster, more cost-effective transactions.

These benefits have captured the attention of traditional financial institutions; however, the lack of regulatory clarity and inconsistent jurisdictional approaches remain bottlenecks to the tokenization trend. Thin secondary trading, which limits liquidity, is another factor obstructing growth.

Blockchain itself presents unique risks, such as phishing scams and smart contract bugs, which require robust cybersecurity measures. Despite these challenges, the tokenization of real-world assets continues to gain momentum.

Dubai’s Tokenized Property Push

Real estate is a massive market, and it is anticipated to reach a staggering $673 trillion by 2026, while market volume is expected to climb to $727 trillion by 2029, according to Statesman.

Among the fast-growing markets, Portugal, South Korea, Saudi Arabia, and Dubai are experiencing significant booms.

Given real estate tokenization’s ability to unlock a new investment paradigm and Dubai’s mise au point croissante on digitization, the largest and most populous metropolis in the UAE has been actively embedding tokenization into its regulatory framework and public real estate infrastructure.

Last year, DLD, the government agency responsible for the registration, organization, and promotion of real estate investments in Dubai, laid out a roadmap to tokenize 7% of the city’s real estate market by 2033, worth about $16 billion.

In line with that roadmap, the agency first developed a platform called Prypco Mint, in partnership with Ctrl Alt and the real estate fintech firm Prypco, to tokenize property deeds on the XRP Ledger, with Zand Bank as the banking partner.

The platform allows investors to purchase fractional ownership in local properties using local currency, starting at just 2,000 dirhams (about $544). While initially available only to UAE ID cardholders and supporting only dirham transactions, DLD plans to expand access globally and later integrate more platforms.

Back in May, the agency successfully launched its first tokenized property, which was fully subscribed within 24 hours. Then, a month later, DLD épuisé its second tokenized real estate project via the Prypco Mint in under 2 minutes. It generated a waitlist of more than 10,700 potential buyers.

This strong investor response was described by Prypco founder and CEO Amira Sajwani as a sign that “investors are ready for a smarter, more accessible way to invest in real estate.”

With secondary market trading now underway, the government has begun the second phase of the pilot, which aims to assess market efficiency, operational readiness, and alignment with current property laws, while strengthening transparency and investor protections.

The project’s infrastructure partner, Ctrl Alt, which minted the tokens representing deed ownership during Phase One, is now also helping deploy secondary market functionality for Phase Two.

The platform has been directly integrated with the DLD system, enabling title deed tokens to be issued, managed, and transferred on-chain. It also ensures that the blockchain records are in sync with the government’s real estate registry.

“Our goal was to build a secondary market infrastructure that is efficient for the entire ecosystem while maintaining the controls and governance required by the DLD and VARA,” said Matt Acheson, CPO at Ctrl Alt, a licensed Virtual Asset Service Provider (VASP), which has tokenized over $850 million in assets across not just real estate but also private credit, funds, commodities and more.

In the current Phase Two, the tokens are also paired with Asset-Referenced Virtual Assets (ARVAs) tokens to enable regulated transfers in the secondary market. This second layer governs who can trade tokens and under what conditions, ensuring all trades comply.

“To achieve this, Ctrl Alt engineered a sophisticated technical framework to facilitate the dual operation of ARVA management tokens and ownership tokens seamlessly on-chain.”

– Acheson

So, Ctrl Alt manages the underlying complexity of the tokenization technology, while distribution platforms like PRYPCO focus solely on delivering smooth, fractional real estate experiences to end users.

Tokenization Goes Global

In Dubai, real estate tokenization is rapidly evolving from pilot programs to a regulated, high-growth market. But the trend isn’t limited to just the UAE; governments, financial institutions, and private developers across the Middle East, Asia, Europe, and North America are increasingly exploring blockchain-based property ownership models.

More recently, Saudi Arabia successfully executed a tokenized transfer of a property title deed. With this milestone, the sovereign Arab Islamic state has made a solid move towards its digital transformation goals outlined in Saudi Vision 2030.

The transaction was executed between the Real Estate Development Fund (REDF) and the government-backed affordable housing solution developer, the National Housing Company (NHC).

For this transaction, they utilized droppRWA’s sovereign-grade infrastructure, which provided everything from token standard, compliance logic, and issuance framework to a stable delivery-versus-payment mechanism.

“We have successfully executed the Kingdom’s first end-to-end blockchain verified real estate transaction, using the first government-authored standards for tokenizing real estate ownership. By linking transactions directly to official records from the outset, this will expand participation, strengthen FDI confidence, improve liquidity, accelerate development financing, and enable new PropTech innovation.”

– Majed bin Abdullah Al-Hogail, Minister of Municipal Rural Affairs and Housing

Even Kazakhstan’s central bank has launched a pilot for real estate tokenization.

As per the project, commercial property-backed tokens will be issued, each representing 1 sqm of a property. For now, the pilot is being carried out within a regulatory sandbox under careful oversight to help create a clear mechanism for participation and lay the foundation for broader adoption.

The tokenization trend also led Lit Bath & Beyond (BBBY + 11.83%) à annoncer plans to launch a platform for asset tokenization. This will start with real estate, with people enabled to see the value of what they own and access financing in one place.

“Providing responsible, compliant liquidity pathways for homeowners and real-world asset holders is our strategy and long-term vision,” said CEO Marcus Lemonis. The e-commerce retailer is also interested in acquiring blockchain technology company, Jetons.com, which will expand its portfolio already including tZERO and GrainChain.

Meanwhile, in South Asia, World Liberty Financial (WLFI), a crypto company partly owned by the family of US President Donald Trump, and luxury real estate developer DarGlobal announced plans to tokenize a Trump-branded resort in the Maldives.

Tokenization, according to DarGlobal CEO Ziad El Chaar, will make real estate investing accessible to many more investors who cannot access it today.

“This marks a breakthrough for real estate investment,” said Chaar. “Together, we are rethinking how qualified investors can access, trade, and ultimately gain liquidity in loan revenue interests in high-quality real estate as it is being developed.”

The deal was announced at a World Liberty Financial forum held at Mar-a-Lago, which was attended by traditional finance (TradFi) players like Franklin Templeton CEO Jenny Johnson and Goldman Sachs (GS + 1.26%) CEO David Solomon; crypto industry representatives included Coinbase (COIN -0.14%) CEO Brian Armstrong, and Binance founder Changpeng Zhao, along with Senators Ashley Moody and Bernie Moreno, hotel billionaire Barry Sternlicht, FIFA president Gianni Infantino, and rapper Nicki Minaj.

The plan is to tokenize loan revenue interests in Trump International Hotel & Resort, Maldives, a luxury hospitality property featuring about 100 ultra-luxury beaches and overwater villas. It is slated to be completed in 2030.

The token offering will offer eligible investors both a fixed yield and loan revenue streams from the property.

More specifically, they will be offered in a private placement and sold only to verified accredited investors. Access to the initial offering will be enabled via select wallets and third-party partners. The tokens may carry additional on-chain utilities such as the ability to use holdings as loan collateral through WLFI Markets.

“We built World Liberty Financial to open up decentralized finance to the world,” and with this announcement, “we are now extending that access to tokenized real estate,” said World Liberty Financial co-founder Eric Trump. “For the first time, eligible participants can be a part of an iconic property.”

The tokenization of the resort, currently in development, will be done in partnership with Securitize, a tokenization firm that provides the infrastructure to turn traditional assets into on-chain tokens.

The platform is used by BlackRock for its on-chain U.S. dollar money-market fund, BUIDL, holding 2.46 milliards de dollars en valeur totale.

“Real estate has been one of the hardest asset classes to tokenize effectively,” said Carlos Domingo, co-founder and CEO of Securitize. “We believe that scalable on-chain real estate products issued with compliance, governance, and market structure in mind will be globally sought after.”

The financial technology company recently reported a 841% increase in revenue for the first nine months of 2025, reaching $55.6 million.

This was shared as part of the company’s SEC filing to go public on Nasdaq under the ticker SECZ, through a merger with Cantor Equity Partners II (CEPT), a Cantor Fitzgerald-backed blank-check company, which has yet to be approved by shareholders and regulators.

Le point de bascule

It’s pretty clear that the tokenisation des actifs du monde réel (RWA) trend is gradually spreading all over.

Tokenization has been in development for a decade, but it was in the last few years that it began gaining traction across traditional finance. From global banks like JPMorgan (JPM -0.26%) to large asset managers like BlackRock (BLK + 1.17%), TradFi giants are increasingly including tokenized assets in their offerings.

This adoption comes against the backdrop of accelerating demand for blockchain-based settlement infrastructure, the rising need to modernize outdated financial plumbing, and growing projections that tokenized assets could swell into a multi-trillion-dollar market over the next decade.

A report by Boston Consulting Group (BCG) and Ripple estimates the market of tokenized assets, including stablecoins, to atteindre 19 2033 milliards de dollars d'ici XNUMX as the technology’s growth nears a “tipping point.”

This growth is at the middle of the report’s moderate $12 trillion forecast and a more optimistic $23.4 trillion projection in the next seven years.

Si Bons du Trésor américain tokenisés have already had an early success, allowing corporate treasurers to move their idle cash into tokenized short-term government bonds without any intermediaries, the report also highlighted tokenization of private credit and carbon emissions as use cases, where blockchain can provide transparency, traceability, and fractional ownership to traditionally opaque and illiquid markets.

Already, RWA tokenization has surpassed $25 billion in value, spanning US Treasury debt, commodities, private credit, corporate bonds, public and private equity, institutional alternative funds, and real estate, according to data from rwa.xyz. This value has grown about 10x over the past 2 years.

Among all the assets, real estate is one of the slowest ones to move on-chain. So far, just 64 properties, worth a combined M $ 372, have been tokenized globally, though that figure has grown more than 13x from $27 million at the beginning of last year.

The tokenization of real estate also accounts for a tiny slice of the global property market. But according to Deloitte’s projections, $4 trillion of real estate is expected to be tokenized by 2035.

“Tokenized real estate could not only pave the way for new markets and products, but also give real estate organizations an opportunity to overcome challenges related to operational inefficiency, high administrative costs charged to investors, and limited retail participation,” said Deloitte in its rapport l'année dernière.

The growth projected by the consulting giant in the global forecasted tokenized real estate ecosystem is expected across three main components.

Tokenized ownership of loans and securitizations is one of the components the report expects will account for the highest share of tokenized real estate, reaching $2.39 trillion by 2035, with a total market penetration rate of 0.55%.

These may not be a likely candidate for tokenization due to their role in the 2008 global financial crisis and the subsequent regulatory oversight, but the report notes that blockchain asset-backed securities are attracting significant investor interest.

Private real estate funds, however, have the most potential, with a market penetration rate of 8.5% and are expected to reach $1 trillion in 9 years.

These funds, which can be tokenized by either issuing new funds on-chain or tokenizing an off-chain fund, Deloitte noted, could be a suitable use case for tokenizing real estate assets by reducing the role of intermediaries, thus creating a more efficient fund. Here, single and interconnected platforms can offer a seamless way to handle the issuance of equity interests, asset servicing, and trading, it said.

Meanwhile, tokenized ownership of projects under construction or undeveloped land is anticipated to reach $50 billion during this time, with a market penetration rate of 0.80%.

With data centers and infrastructure projects gathering renewed interest, fractional ownership through tokenization could enable investors to have ownership of capital-intensive development projects with attractive returns.

Real estate asset tokenization, according to Deloitte, “can allow institutional investors to create custom portfolios with tokens that match their investment thesis. And while traditional financial instruments lacked hyper-personalization, tokenization can make it possible.”

D’après une rapport by EY, investors are expected to increase their portfolio allocation to tokenized assets by 2% by 2027. Interestingly, tokenized assets’ allocation in real estate portfolios is projected to grow more aggressively, by 4.7%, to 6% by 2027 and beyond.

The report also revealed that real estate ranked either the top or second-most-favored tokenized alternative among 49% of HNWIs and 56% of institutional investors.

All these findings reflect growing confidence in the potential of blockchain to transform the real estate market.

According to Sternlicht, whose Starwood Capital manages over $120 billion in AUM, tokenization can revolutionize the industry. “The technology is superior,” and “the future,” said Sternlicht. He actually compared the current state of tokenization to AI, saying, “This is even earlier in the physical world than AI is.” He added:

“It’s a fantastic thing for the world, the world just has to catch up with it.”

Conclusion

The future of real estate tokenization is clearly bright, garnering significant traction among developers, investors, technology providers, and governments. As technology advances, infrastructure matures, and regulatory clarity improves, tokenized real estate will grow and lead to better pricing and investment strategies.