UAE Shatters Global Rankings, Claims Top Spot in Tokenized Real Estate Revolution
Forget sandcastles—the UAE is building digital fortresses. The global race to tokenize trillions in real estate just found its new leader, and it's not who you'd expect.
From Oil Barons to Blockchain Pioneers
The shift is seismic. Traditional property markets, bogged down by paperwork and gatekeepers, are getting a desert-style disruption. The UAE's ascent isn't about building more towers; it's about slicing existing ones into digital shares anyone can own. Liquidity meets brick-and-mortar.
The New Blueprint for Global Finance
This isn't just a ranking—it's a power move. By creating a regulatory sandbox that actually works, the Emirates have turned speculation into infrastructure. Global capital, always hunting for yield and innovation, is taking note. The old hubs? They're playing catch-up with rulebooks written for a pre-blockchain era.
What's Fueling the Climb?
Speed, clarity, and ambition. While other markets debate investor accreditation, the UAE is deploying asset-backed tokens. They’ve cut the middleman, bypassed the legacy banking bottlenecks, and offered a stark alternative: invest in a fraction of a hotel, not just a crypto meme coin. It’s a tangible use case that makes decentralized finance look, well, useful.
The Ripple Effect
Watch the dominoes fall. This top ranking sends a signal to institutional money that's been circling crypto's edges. Tokenization of real-world assets (RWA) is no longer a niche experiment—it's a viable, leading strategy with a proven champion. Expect portfolios to rebalance from purely digital assets to these hybrid, income-generating tokens.
The message is clear. The future of property investment is being coded not in Silicon Valley, but alongside the Persian Gulf. And for traditional finance, still counting its paper profits? Let's just say their asset registers are looking a little… illiquid.
UAE-regulated Mantra Chain has tokenized the most real estate assets
In terms of blockchain networks, Mantra Chain, the regulated tokenization network out of the UAE, has the lion’s share in terms of networks. Mantra Chain tokenized $117.7 million of real estate assets, followed by Base at $81.5 million worth, and Stellar at $71.7 million.
Meanwhile, the Ctrl Alt tokenization platform led in terms of the most real estate tokenized assets, with $124 million in total value.
In terms of tokenized properties, World Islands in the UAE tokenized the most properties, with the DAMAC City tower being tokenized as well as the Dubai Marina Hotel, which was tokenized on XRP Ledger by Ctrl Alt. Other UAE properties included Kensington Waters and Sobha Creeks.
Real estate tokenization market size is still small
While the real estate tokenization market size is still small compared to other tokenized assets such as stablecoins, which are at $293 billion, or U.S. Treasuries, which are at $10 billion, it is catching up to stocks, which are currently $942 million in terms of total market value.
In terms of future outlook, industry analyses, including forecasts from Deloitte, suggest the market for tokenized real estate could grow from less than $300 billion in 2024 to over $4 trillion by 2035, driven by a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of approximately 27%.
Tokenized real estate debt securities are projected to represent the highest share of the market, potentially hitting $2.39 trillion by 2035, followed by private real estate funds at $1 trillion.
In MENA, the UAE is currently leading on this front, but with Saudi Arabia’s recent foray into real estate tokenization, it soon might also become a leading player in the sector. The Real Estate Registry Authority, part of REGA in KSA, has developed a tokenized registry for Saudi properties, built by SettleMint, with nine Proptechs currently building applications in its sandbox.
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