The Dubai Land Department (DLD) and tokenization firm Ctrl Alt unveiled a secondary market for property-backed tokens, enabling the resale of $5 million in fractional ownership in an announcement on Friday.
Approximately 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 property tokenization, turning property ownership into tradable tokens on blockchain rails. Proponents argue that blockchain rails can streamline ownership records and settlement. However, uneven regulation remains a bottleneck and thin secondary trading can limit liquidity, a report from EY pointed out.
The tokenized real estate market is still a small slice 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 of real estate will be tokenized by 2035, growing at 27% per year.
Dubai’s $16 billion roadmap
DLD, a government agency for the real estate industry, laid out a roadmap last year to tokenize 7% – or about $16 billion – of Dubai’s real estate market by 2033. The first milestone in this plan was the launch of a platform developed with Prypco and Ctrl Alt to tokenize property deeds on the XRP Ledger (XRP) chain.
Trading tokens on the secondary market is part of the second phase of the pilot project, which aims to test market infrastructure, investor protection and alignment with existing real estate legislation. Ctrl Alt, the project’s infrastructure partner, has integrated directly with the DLD system to issue and manage deed tokens on the chain.
Tokens are also paired with another layer – Asset-Referenced Virtual Assets (ARVAs) – that regulate who can trade them and under what conditions. This setup ensures that all trades are compliant and accurately reflected in Dubai’s official property registry.
Read more: Real estate billionaire Barry Sternlicht ready to tokenize assets, but says US regulation blocks it
