Dubai has just turned a long‑promised vision into live financial infrastructure: tokenized real estate on the XRP Ledger is now trading on a regulated secondary market. This is not another sandbox experiment, but a functioning marketplace where millions of dollars’ worth of Dubai property are being bought and sold as blockchain tokens.

Phase Two: From Pilot to Live Market

On 20 February, Ctrl Alt and the Dubai Land Department (DLD) activated Phase Two of their real estate tokenization project on XRPL. Around 7.8 million tokens issued in the initial pilot are now eligible for resale in a controlled secondary market, with every transaction settled on the XRP Ledger and secured by Ripple’s institutional custody solution.

The pilot, launched in 2025 with DLD, Ctrl Alt, the Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority (VARA) and the Dubai Future Foundation, tokenized ten properties worth over AED 18.5 million (about 5 million dollars). Each property was split into fractional tokens, allowing thousands of smaller investors to co‑own assets that were previously the preserve of high‑net‑worth buyers.

Reece Merrick, Ripple’s Managing Director for the Middle East and Africa, summed up the significance in a single line on X: this development is “building on the pilot” to bring live, regulated secondary trading of tokenized properties to XRPL, secured by Ripple Custody via partner Ctrl Alt.

How Tokenized Property Changes the Rules

Dubai’s real estate market has historically been a high‑barrier asset class: minimum tickets in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, long settlement chains, and no way to sell “half an apartment” if you needed liquidity. The XRPL‑based structure attacks all three pain points at once.

Traditional property deals in Dubai typically involve:

• High entry thresholds, effectively excluding most retail and many international investors.

• Illiquidity: ownership is binary, and partial disposals are impractical.

• Settlement times measured in weeks, requiring notaries, paperwork and multiple intermediaries.

By contrast, the tokenized framework on XRPL offers:

• Fractional ownership: investors can participate with much smaller tickets via tokens representing interests in special‑purpose vehicles (SPVs) that hold the underlying properties.

• Instant, on‑chain liquidity: tokens can be resold within a regulated secondary market, similar to trading shares.

• Near‑real‑time settlement: transfers of ownership are recorded on the XRP Ledger in seconds, without traditional chains of intermediaries.

Importantly, these tokens represent claims on SPVs rather than direct title deeds, a structure designed to keep the project aligned with existing property law while still unlocking capital‑market style trading. Success will depend on investor confidence in these legal wrappers and on the depth of liquidity that controlled venues can ultimately attract.

Dubai’s Broader Crypto Bet

Dubai’s move does not exist in isolation; it fits into a national strategy to turn the UAE into a global crypto and digital‑asset hub. Surveys and policy statements show that over 65% of UAE residents report owning some form of cryptocurrency, one of the highest adoption rates in the world. More than 1,800 crypto and Web3 firms now operate in the country, employing thousands of people as regulators roll out dedicated virtual‑asset frameworks.

Regulatory momentum has been particularly visible in Abu Dhabi and Dubai:

• Abu Dhabi saw a 67% jump in new crypto licenses in the first quarter of 2025 versus the same period a year earlier, according to local economic data.

• The Dubai Financial Services Authority (DFSA) has formally categorized certain stablecoins as “fiat crypto tokens”, a definitional step that typically precedes full rulebooks for issuance and use.

DFSA, VARA and other UAE bodies are converging on a model where rapid innovation is encouraged but boxed into clear, license‑based regimes. That approach is what makes institutional projects like DLD’s tokenization program possible: the technology sits on a public blockchain, but issuance and trading occur under regulated, permissioned conditions.

Ctrl Alt Looks Beyond Bricks and Mortar

Real estate is only the first asset class Ctrl Alt is bringing on‑chain in size. Earlier this month, the company, together with Billiton Diamond, announced the tokenization of more than AED 1 billion (about 280 million dollars) in certified polished diamonds on XRPL, again safeguarded by Ripple’s custody technology.

Under that structure:

• Billiton supplies inventory from approved partners, each stone backed by grading certificates, provenance records and real‑time inventory data.

• Ctrl Alt provides the end‑to‑end tokenization infrastructure, minting diamond‑backed tokens on the XRP Ledger.

• Ripple Custody secures the underlying assets at an institutional standard.

Diamonds are a textbook example of an illiquid, opaque asset: high value, fragmented markets, complex logistics. Tokenization aims to convert them into transparent, investable digital units that can ultimately trade on primary and secondary markets, subject to regulatory approval from VARA and other authorities.

With real estate and diamonds now live or in rollout, the direction of travel is clear: Ctrl Alt is building a multi‑asset tokenization stack on XRPL, with Dubai and the wider UAE as the proving ground.

XRPL’s Real‑World Asset Moment

For the XRP Ledger, the Dubai developments are part of a broader repositioning: from being seen mainly as the backbone of Ripple’s cross‑border payments solutions to serving as a general‑purpose rail for real‑world asset (RWA) tokenization.

Across jurisdictions, major institutions have begun to anchor RWAs on XRPL and related Ripple infrastructure:

• Dubai Land Department and Ctrl Alt issue and trade real estate tokens on XRPL.

• Billiton and Ctrl Alt tokenize diamond inventories on the same chain.

• European banking groups such as Société Générale and others have experimented with tokenized fiat instruments and euro‑denominated assets, including pilots that use Ripple‑affiliated custody and settlement stacks.

• Market infrastructure players like Citi, Deutsche Börse and BBVA have turned to Ripple for digital‑asset custody or tokenization platforms in various pilots and deployments, strengthening the institutional ecosystem around XRPL.

What is striking is that XRP, the native asset, is not the centre of the story from a corporate strategy perspective. Ripple’s pitch to regulators and clients is not about price speculation; it is about using XRPL as a neutral, high‑throughput layer‑1 for issuing and transferring tokens that represent “real” value: property, commodities, currencies, securities.

The long‑term ambition is straightforward and radical: every significant real‑world asset, from an apartment in Dubai Marina to a parcel of industrial diamonds, could have a compliant digital twin—and a growing share of those twins may end up living on the XRP Ledger.

Why This Matters Now

For global finance, Dubai’s secondary market launch is a meaningful line in the sand. It demonstrates that:

• Public‑chain tokenization of regulated assets can move beyond proofs‑of‑concept into live, supervised markets.

• Fractionalization and instant settlement are not theoretical benefits but daily realities for a new cohort of investors.

• A jurisdiction willing to align regulation, infrastructure and political will can leapfrog legacy models in key sectors like real estate.

For the XRP ecosystem, this is a validation of a long‑running thesis: that the most durable use cases will come not from speculative cycles but from embedding blockchains deeply into the plumbing of traditional finance and real‑asset markets.

The question is no longer whether tokenization will matter, but which platforms will carry the weight. Dubai’s decision to put regulated property and high‑value commodities on XRPL is an early, emphatic vote.