Real estate is one of the most valuable and foundational asset classes in the global economy. For individuals, families, and institutions alike, property ownership represents stability, income, and opportunity. Yet despite its significance, real estate remains a complex and often fragmented market, constrained by outdated processes, jurisdictional silos, and inefficiencies that limit access and innovation.
At Ripple, we believe blockchain can unlock new value in real estate—but only with the right infrastructure, the right partners, and a clear path from vision to reality. As someone who’s worked in enterprise blockchain for nearly a decade, I’ve witnessed firsthand the evolution of this technology from niche experimentation to regulated adoption at scale. Nowhere is this shift more evident than in the realm of real-world asset (RWA) tokenization.
Today, Ripple is proud to support groundbreaking pilots such as the Dubai Land Department’s (DLD) Real Estate Tokenisation Project, a collaboration with the Dubai Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority (VARA) and the Dubai Future Foundation (DFF). Together, this initiative aims to set a global standard for onchain real estate by directly linking title deeds to blockchain-based representations of ownership. This isn’t just a local milestone, it’s a bold move toward a global future of programmable, transparent property markets.
But how did we get here?
The Global Rise of Real-World Asset Tokenization
When I first entered the blockchain space in 2015, few institutions were publicly experimenting with the technology. Most early conversations were conducted under codenames—there was a real hesitancy to be associated with what many still equated with Bitcoin, which at the time was often linked in the public imagination to darknet markets like Silk Road rather than legitimate financial infrastructure.
That’s changed. Blockchain is no longer a curiosity, it’s becoming the infrastructure for how value is issued, exchanged, and managed. In recent years, we’ve seen tokenization emerge as one of the most promising applications of public blockchains, bringing new liquidity, transparency, and efficiency to a wide range of asset classes.
What began with private ledgers and siloed experiments has matured into public, interoperable networks. Institutions are no longer building the same walled gardens with new tools, they’re redesigning the market model altogether.
Real-world asset tokenization is now live across every major region, with regional nuances:
In North America and Europe, the focus is on tokenized treasuries and money market funds, used by corporate treasuries to optimize returns and liquidity.
In Latin America, we see increasing traction with tokenized agricultural finance, such as securitized agri-receivables.
In Southeast Asia, trade receivables and structured lending dominate.
And in MENA, real estate stands out as the most in-demand asset class for tokenization, driven by Dubai’s progressive regulatory stance and forward-thinking ecosystem.
What this shows is simple, tokenization is no longer a theory, and there is no one-size-fits-all asset class. It’s a global trend responding to regional market realities.
Ripple’s Role in Real Estate and RWA Tokenization
Ripple’s vision, of enabling an Internet of Value, has always been built on open networks. Since launching in 2012, the XRP Ledger (XRPL) has served as a purpose-built public blockchain designed for the issuance and exchange of any kind of value.
Over time, we’ve come to understand that successful tokenization requires three core pillars:
Availability: The issuance of a token with a sound legal and regulatory basis.
Accessibility: Distribution through the right infrastructure for custody, compliance, liquidity and user experience.
Utility: Real-world incentives for holding or transacting with the asset.
We work across all three pillars to ensure successful tokenization outcomes. The XRPL enables native token issuance, offers built-in decentralized exchange (DEX), and is evolving to support stablecoin functionality through RLUSD, lending protocols, and programmable escrows. Ripple Custody complements this by delivering secure, institutional-grade custody services for digital and tokenized assets. Meanwhile, strategic partnerships are already underway to help bring these assets to market, ensuring they reach the right investors in the right regulatory and distribution environments.
And we’re just getting started.
From Pilot to Progress: Real Estate Tokenization in Action
Over the years, Ripple has supported multiple real estate tokenization pilots, and each has offered invaluable insights:
Colombia: Land Registry Modernization
One of our earliest projects was with the Colombian Ministry of Information and Communications Technologies (MinTIC), focused on improving transparency and ownership verification in a market plagued by land swaps and fraud. We worked with key partners, Peersyst, to tokenize land ownership resolutions on the XRP Ledger, allowing for notarized property records that reduce disputes and increase trust.
Hong Kong: Property-Backed Lending
As part of the HKMA e-HKD Phase 1 pilot, Ripple partnered with Fubon Bank to bring tokenized real estate to the XRPL as collateral for a digital revolving line of credit (HELOC). This solution would enable homeowners to unlock liquidity from their property in real-time. However, challenges with deed centralization in Hong Kong meant the tokenized assets shifted from title deeds to bank charges, highlighting how legal infrastructure still shapes what’s possible.
Dubai: Title Deed Tokenization
Dubai is now leading the way. The Real Estate Tokenization Project, backed by the DLD, VARA, and DFF, represents one of the most comprehensive efforts to bring title-level real estate onto the blockchain. Ripple has helped bring this project to the XRPL and has simultaneously continued to make important regulatory strides in the region after recently securing its DFSA license to offer regulated blockchain-powered payments in the UAE.
But what makes Dubai’s Real Estate Tokenization Project different? The Dubai ecosystem, across public institutions, regulators, and industry leaders, is collaborating from day one to design a model that scales. Legal clarity, technical infrastructure, and ecosystem alignment are all being built concurrently.
This is what it takes to go from pilot to platform.
What Comes Next
We believe that tokenizing real estate can unlock significant value across multiple dimensions. It creates new forms of liquidity that benefit both retail and institutional investors. It enhances transparency around ownership and title verification, reducing friction in real estate transactions. It introduces programmable features that enable use cases like collateralization, fractional ownership, and automated yield. And critically, it increases interoperability, making real estate more accessible within global digital asset markets.
But success depends on getting the foundation right. That’s why Ripple is committed to building not just the technology, but the partnerships and regulatory models that make real estate tokenization viable in the long term.
The work in Dubai is a significant next step. It has the potential to be the world’s first fully scaled, regulator-approved real estate tokenization initiative, and one that sets a new global benchmark.
Real estate tokenization is no longer a theoretical exercise, it’s a tangible opportunity poised to transform how we access, manage, and exchange one of the world’s most valuable asset classes. By combining trusted infrastructure, strategic partnerships, and deep market experience, Ripple is helping bring this vision to life.
Learn about how your institution can tokenize real-world assets at scale on the XRPL.
