Over 3,000 investors have signed up for Dubai’s pioneering real estate tokenization program. Mahmoud AlBurai, a senior executive at the Dubai Land Department (DLD), disclosed this in a LinkedIn post. This initiative marks the first such program in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. Launched on March 16th, the DLD partnered with Prypco Mint and Ctrl Alt to tokenize ownership deeds of government-owned properties. These fractional shares will be offered to investors. However, only Emirates Card holders, official residents of the United Arab Emirates, can currently participate in this program. Despite this eligibility limit, significant interest has been generated from many interested parties. This program’s success is attributed to active participation from regulatory bodies such as Dubai Future Foundation, Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority (VARA), and the Central Bank of the UAE. These efforts build confidence among potential investors. While still in its early stages, the DLD anticipates a $16 billion market by 2033, driven by blockchain’s transparency, accessibility, and efficiency in the real estate sector. The choice of Ripple’s XRP Ledger for this pilot phase highlights a significant milestone for the network. While XRP has seen minimal activity compared to other smart contract networks, it demonstrates potential for tokenization within the real estate market. Ripple actively supports real-world asset (RWA) tokenization on XRPL and invested in several projects like Abrdn’s money market fund and OpenEden’s US Treasury bills. This program could propel XRPL towards wider institutional adoption as it gains traction from financial institutions and regulators, who are now focusing on tokenizing financial products such as securities and bonds. Dubai’s Real Estate Tokenization Sandbox project may lead the way in real estate tokenization globally. With an impressive $3 billion worth of assets already tokenized in the UAE, this initiative could pave the way for Dubai to become a leader in the field. The government-backed project with regulatory backing from various agencies like the SEC lawsuit’s potential impact on private projects. This lawsuit alleges Unicoin, which claimed ownership of several tokenized properties, did not actually own any and inflated their value while misleading investors about returns.