TL;DR
- In March 2025 Dubai Land Department (DLD) launched a pilot to tokenise property title deeds, the first real estate registry in the Middle East to do so.
- The registration sector that anchors those tokens in the official registry is led by Majid Al Marri, CEO of the Real Estate Registration Sector at DLD.
- For European investors this means market entry from about EUR 500, settled in dirhams, with a DLD-backed title and a regulated secondary market.
A property registry rarely makes headlines. In Dubai it has become the ground on which the future of real estate investment is being tested. Overseeing it is Majid Al Marri, CEO of the Real Estate Registration Sector at Dubai Land Department, appointed under Executive Council Resolution No. 48 of 2025. His sector governs title deeds, the exact layer that tokenisation converts into digital assets.
A pilot that became an operation
In March 2025 DLD launched the pilot phase of its Real Estate Tokenisation Project, becoming the first real estate registry in the region to apply tokenisation to title deeds. It was run with the Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority (VARA), the Dubai Future Foundation and the Central Bank of the UAE. The first offering, live from May 2025 on the Prypco Mint platform, drew 224 investors from over 40 nationalities, with an AED 2.4 million listing fully funded in under a day.
Real estate tokenisation emerges as a revolutionary tool driving fundamental change in the real estate sector.
Marwan bin Ghalita, then Director General, Dubai Land Department
In February 2026 DLD launched Phase II, opening a secondary market for roughly 7.8 million tokens. Investors can now resell fractional stakes through the Prypco Mint app around the clock, within a band of plus or minus 15 percent of the current valuation.
Why it matters to a European buyer
The design is strikingly cautious, and that is its strength:
- Currency. All transactions settle in UAE dirhams. No cryptocurrency is used during the pilot phase.
- Entry barrier. Tokenised shares can be bought from AED 2,000, roughly EUR 500.
- Legal title. The investor receives an ownership share documented by DLD, not mere market exposure.
- Regulation. Only VARA-licensed firms may tokenise, and DLD validates pricing fairness before any listing is approved.
For a European investor used to full cash purchase or a mortgage, this rewrites the entry logic. Liquidity comes from the secondary market, credibility from the state registry.
A registry-backed ownership share, bought from about EUR 500, with a regulated secondary market.
The registry as a platform
Tokenisation did not appear from nowhere. Since 2018 DLD has run Dubai REST ("Real Estate Self Transaction"), a digital platform consolidating registry services. Tokenised Property Certificates can now be downloaded from the property wallet inside the Dubai REST app. The whole effort sits within the Dubai Real Estate Strategy 2033 and the D33 economic agenda. The stated ambition is for tokenised assets to reach 7 percent of the market by 2033, about AED 60 billion (USD 16 billion).
In parallel, the DIFC Innovation Hub and DLD launched the Dubai PropTech Hub, targeting support for more than 200 startups and over USD 300 million in investment by 2030. For Europe the signal is clear: Dubai is building not only a market, but its digital infrastructure.