Dubai Land Department Launches Its First Tokenized Real Estate Platform

The Dubai Land Department (DLD), a government agency for the real estate industry, has launched its first tokenized real estate platform

The Dubai Land Department (DLD) has launched its first tokenized real estate platform, called Prypco Mint, in a move that could see $16 billion of the city’s real estate market digitized by 2033.

The government agency unveiled the platform on Sunday with the aim of offering fractional ownership in Dubai properties to investors for as low as 2,000 dirhams, or about $540.

The initiative is part of the agency’s efforts to boost direct investment in the property sector and broaden the base of investors in response to the government’s strategy to enhance the competitiveness of the real estate industry.

The platform’s initial phase will only allow transactions in dirhams and is available to those with UAE ID card. However, it will expand to support more currencies and grant access to a wider audience in the coming period.

The agency also plans to integrate more platforms in the future and expand the offering to include fractional ownership in other types of assets.

Zand Digital Bank is serving as the banking partner, while regulatory oversight comes from the UAE Central Bank, Dubai’s Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority (VARA) and the Dubai Future Foundation through its Real Estate Sandbox.

The technical backbone of the project is tokenization specialist Ctrl Alt’s infrastructure, which has selected the XRP Ledger blockchain to place property title deeds on. The company said it has directly integrated with DLD’s systems to ensure that the blockchain records stay in sync with traditional government real estate ledgers.

The launch follows Dubai’s initiative that aims to accelerate tokenization, a red-hot crypto trend, of the city’s booming property market. The agency projected that tokenized real estate could account for 7%, roughly $16 billion, of the city’s total property transactions by 2033.

Tokenization stands for using blockchains for moving and recording ownership of traditional financial instruments like bonds, funds or real estate, attracting a slew of global banks and asset managers with the promise of operational gains and faster, cheaper settlements. It could be a huge opportunity: tokenized assets could grow to a multiple trillion-dollar market over the next few years, as projected by Ripple, BCG, McKinsey and others.