Dubai Land Department pushes tokenised real estate on XRP Ledger

Dubai is moving from property digitisation to property market redesign. The emirate’s Land Department is advancing a tokenised real-estate trading initiative and has selected Ripple’s XRP Ledger infrastructure for parts of the project, according to Bitcoin.com.

The pitch is fractional ownership, faster settlement, and broader investor access. The more interesting angle is why a land authority wants tokenisation at all. In a conventional property system, ownership is slow to transfer, hard to slice, and often opaque—features that protect incumbents, limit leverage chains, and keep secondary trading thin. Tokenisation, by contrast, is a deliberate attempt to create liquidity in an asset class that is politically sensitive precisely because it is illiquid.

For the state, the incentives are straightforward. A tokenised registry can make beneficial ownership more legible, automate fee collection, and tighten compliance. “Transparency” in this context is not a moral aspiration; it is an administrative capability. When every transfer, pledge, and fractional claim is recorded in a programmable system, the tax base becomes easier to measure and enforce, and anti–money laundering (AML) rules can be embedded directly into the rails.

For investors, the appeal is equally clear: smaller ticket sizes and tradable fractions turn property into something closer to a bond or REIT share—an instrument that can be bought, sold, and used as collateral without the friction of traditional conveyancing. But that liquidity is a double-edged sword. Once property becomes a continuously priced financial asset, it invites the same leverage dynamics seen in securities markets: rehypothecation, margining, and rapid liquidation cascades. The very feature that “democratises” access also makes the asset class more sensitive to funding conditions.

This is where the design choice matters. A tokenised real-estate market can be built as a genuinely private exchange ecosystem with competing custodians and clear property-law enforcement—or as a state-run cap table for housing, where permissioned access, whitelisting, and transaction controls become the norm. A land department is unlikely to choose the former if the latter offers more control.

Dubai’s experiment shows governments borrowing the language of decentralised finance while implementing centralised governance. The blockchain provides auditability and automation; the state provides the gatekeeping.

If the initiative succeeds, it will not just change how property trades in Dubai. It will export a template: real estate as programmable collateral, with compliance built into ownership itself.