The Dubai Land Department (DLD) and tokenization company Ctrl Alt unveiled in an announcement on Friday a secondary market for real estate-backed tokens, enabling the resale of $5 million in fractional ownership.
Approximately 7.8 million tokens linked to ten Dubai properties are now eligible to be traded within 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, converting property ownership into tradable tokens on blockchain rails. Proponents argue that blockchain rails can streamline property registrations and settlement. However, uneven regulation remains a bottleneck and low secondary trading can limit liquidity, an EY report noted.
The tokenized real estate market remains a small portion of the global real estate market, but is expected to grow rapidly over the next decade. Deloitte said in a report last year that $4 trillion in real estate will be tokenized by 2035, growing at 27% annually.
Dubai’s $16 billion roadmap
DLD, a government agency for the real estate industry, established a roadmap last year to tokenize 7% (or about $16 billion) of Dubai’s real estate market by 2033. The first milestone of that plan was the start of a platform developed with Prypco and Ctrl Alt to tokenize property titles on the XRP Ledger (XRP) chain.
Trading tokens on the secondary market is part of the second phase of that pilot, which aims to test market infrastructure, investor protection and alignment with existing property laws. Ctrl Alt, the project’s infrastructure partner, has directly integrated with the DLD system to issue and manage on-chain title tokens.
The tokens are also combined with a second layer, 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 Dubai’s official property registry.
Read more: Real estate billionaire Barry Sternlicht willing to tokenize assets, but says US regulation blocks him
