The Dubai Land Department (DLD), a government agency for the real estate industry, said that a pilot of real estate tokenization began, which claims to be the first property registration authority in the Middle East to use blockchain technology for property titles.
The initiative was developed with the regulatory authority of Virtual Assets Watchdog Digital Active and Dubai Future Foundation (DFF). The project is aligned with the 2033 real estate strategy of Dubai and the broader efforts to strengthen its position as a global technology center.
The department projected that tokenized real estate could represent 7% of the city’s total property transactions, reaching 60 billion dirhams ($ 16 billion) by 2033.
Dubai’s impulse in real estate tokenization reflects a growing tendency to integrate blockchain into traditional markets, placing real world assets (RWA) as bonds, funds and credit in cryptographic rails.
Rwas Digital Token versions can be property and fractionally transfer in the block chain, reducing entry barriers to investors and increasing market liquidity. Unlike crowdfunding, which groups investors funds for the purchase of properties, tokenization provides a more structured property model. However, a McKinsey tokenization report last year listed real estate as one of the classes that could face a slower growth tokenization adoption due to operational obstacles.
Marwan Ahmed Bin Ghalita, general director of DLD, said the initiative “would simplify and improve the purchase, sale and investment processes” in local real estate, and the department is getting involved with technology companies to refine the project before expanding it.
