The Dubai Land Department (DLD) and tokenization company Ctrl Alt have unveiled a secondary market for real estate-backed tokens, enabling the resale of $5 million in fractional ownership in an announcement published on Friday.
Around 7.8 million tokens linked to ten Dubai properties are now eligible for trading in a controlled market environment. Transactions will take place on a regulated distribution platform, registered on the XRP Ledger blockchain and secured by Ripple Custody.
The effort is part of Dubai’s ambitious plan to become a global hub for real estate tokenization, transforming real estate ownership into tradable tokens on the blockchain. Proponents argue that blockchain rails can streamline property records and settlement. However, uneven regulation remains a bottleneck and weak secondary trading can limit liquidity, an EY report points out.
The tokenized real estate market still represents only a tiny portion of the global real estate market, but it is expected to grow rapidly over the next decade. Deloitte said in a report last year that $4 trillion worth of real estate will be tokenized by 2035, a growth of 27% per year.
Dubai’s $16 billion roadmap
DLD, a government agency for the real estate sector, last year established a roadmap aimed at tokenizing 7% – or approximately $16 billion – of Dubai’s real estate market by 2033. The first step in this plan was the creation of a platform developed with Prypco and Ctrl Alt to tokenize property deeds on the XRP Ledger (XRP) chain.
Secondary market transactions with the tokens are part of the second phase of this pilot, aimed at testing market infrastructure, investor protection and alignment with existing ownership laws. Ctrl Alt, the project’s infrastructure partner, has integrated directly with the DLD system to issue and manage on-chain title tokens.
Tokens also have a second layer associated with them – asset-referenced virtual assets (ARVA) – which regulate who can trade them and under what conditions. This setup ensures that all transactions are compliant and accurately reflected in the official Dubai Property Registry.
Read more: Real estate billionaire Barry Sternlicht ready to tokenize his assets, but says US regulations are blocking him
