The Dubai Land Department (DLD) and tokenization firm Ctrl Alt unveiled a secondary market for real estate-backed tokens, enabling the resale of $5 million in fractional property ownership in an announcement on Friday.
Roughly 7.8 million tokens tied to ten Dubai properties are now eligible for trading within a controlled market environment. Transactions will take place on a regulated distribution platform, recorded 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, turning ownership in properties 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 by EY pointed out.
The tokenized real estate market is still a tiny slice of the global property market, but it is projected 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 27% a year.
Dubai’s $16 billion roadmap
DLD, a government agency for the real estate industry, set out 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 inception of a platform developed with Prypco and Ctrl Alt to tokenize property deeds on the $XRP Ledger ($XRP) chain.
Secondary market trading with the tokens is part of the second phase of that pilot, aiming to test market infrastructure, investor protections, and alignment with existing property laws. Ctrl Alt, the project’s infrastructure partner, has integrated directly with the DLD system to issue and manage title deed tokens onchain.
The tokens are also paired with a second layer — Asset-Referenced Virtual Assets (ARVAs) — that regulate who can trade them and under what conditions. This setup ensures all trades are compliant and accurately reflected in Dubai’s official property registry.
Read more: Real estate billionaire Barry Sternlicht is ready to tokenize assets, but says U.S. regulation blocks it