Property has been the safest store of wealth in this region for generations. It has also been one of the hardest things to buy into. For most of our history, owning prime real estate in a city like Dubai asked for two things at once: capital sitting idle, and patience for paperwork that moved at its own pace. Without both, you did not get in. The market was never hostile to smaller investors. It simply was not built for them. My Co-founder, Amira Sajwani, and I have spent the past several years on a single question. What would it take for someone to invest in a Dubai apartment with the same ease, transparency and trust they would expect from buying a share on an exchange?
The answer we agreed on was tokenisation.
But tokenisation alone is not the answer. Anyone can build a digital wrapper around a building and call it a token. The real test is whether that token represents genuine, enforceable ownership; whether it is recognised by the authorities responsible for the underlying property; and whether investors can buy, hold and eventually sell it within a regulated system they can trust.
That distinction became the foundation of PRYPCO Mint. We were not simply trying to put real estate on the blockchain. We wanted to bring tokenised ownership inside the legal and regulatory infrastructure of Dubai’s property market and prove that greater access did not have to come at the expense of credibility.
So, I want to set out why PRYPCO built the region’s first real estate tokenisation platform, how that work led us to become the first company in the world to partner with a government authority on tokenised ownership through a title deed, what we learned along the way, and why I think this is the opening chapter rather than the story.
MENA’s First Tokenisation Platform
We were not interested in letting the word “blockchain” do the work of a product.
When we launched PRYPCO Mint in May 2025, the problem in front of us was structural. Real estate here is illiquid, capital-intensive and largely closed to anyone without six or seven figures. Tokenisation changes that arithmetic. Divide a real, income-generating property into digital tokens and access stops being a function of how much money you already hold.
PRYPCO Mint became MENA’s first real estate tokenisation platform. We built it in partnership with regulators rather than around them, and that distinction matters more than most people realise. Plenty of platforms elsewhere have experimented with tokenised property. Experimentation without regulatory backing produces headlines, not confidence. We were after the slower thing.
A Land Authority in the Room
The moment I am proudest of is our work with the Dubai Land Department.
Together we became the first in the world to bring a government land authority directly into the tokenisation of a title deed, and the Department issued what is recognised as the world’s first Property Token Ownership Certificate. This was never an attempt to route around the traditional property system. It was an attempt to bring tokenised ownership inside it.
Here is why that matters. A token means something only when it represents real, enforceable rights to a real asset. The hard part, and the part we did with DLD, is anchoring that token to the same legal title infrastructure that governs every other property transaction in Dubai. That is the line between a novelty and an asset class.
What the Numbers Say
We built PRYPCO Mint to open doors. The response told us the doors needed opening.
Investors from more than 50 nationalities have used the platform to buy into Dubai property, many of them owning a share of real estate anywhere in the world for the first time.
The figure is not what I find meaningful. It is who sits behind it. A teacher, a small business owner, a young professional two years into a career. People who can now start a property portfolio from AED 2,000. That entry point was a deliberate design decision, not a rounding error. A platform that claims to widen access must be priced for the people it claims to serve.
Access is Only Half the Equation
Opening the door to property investment was the first step.
Giving investors a practical way back out was the next. In February 2026, we launched the PRYPCO Mint Marketplace, taking tokenised real estate beyond the pilot stage and into a functioning secondary market. Through the PRYPCO Mint app, eligible investors can buy and sell property tokens 24 hours a day, seven days a week, within a regulated environment, giving them greater flexibility and control over how they enter, manage and exit their investments.
This is an important evolution in digital ownership. The PRYPCO Mint Marketplace points towards a property market that is more liquid, transparent and accessible, bringing real estate, financial infrastructure and digital-asset regulation together within one integrated ecosystem.
Regulation as the Foundation
Every conversation about digital assets in this region arrives at regulation and it should.
PRYPCO Mint operates under the oversight of the Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority. That licence was not a box we ticked on the way to market. It was a condition we set before we would call ourselves ready. VARA’s framework, alongside the Dubai Land Department’s participation, gives investors what the wider industry has struggled to offer: a tokenised asset that sits inside a recognised legal structure rather than beside it.
This is the model I would encourage the rest of the region, and frankly the rest of the world, to study. Tokenised real estate will not be won by whoever moves fastest or markets loudest. It will be won by whoever builds the most credible bridge between blockchain-based ownership and the legal systems that have protected property rights for centuries. Dubai has shown one way to build that bridge.
Next Steps
We are still early, and I would rather say so.
Tokenisation of real-world assets is projected to become a significant opportunity for this region over the next decade, and Dubai’s own real estate strategy already anticipates tokenised assets making up a meaningful share of the market by the early 2030s. PRYPCO intends to keep leading that shift: widening the range of properties on the platform, deepening liquidity so token holders can buy and sell with confidence, and working with regulators across the region who are watching Dubai closely.
When we started PRYPCO, the goal was never to be first. It was to prove that real estate investment could be rebuilt around access, transparency and trust, and that a region often described as a fast follower in financial innovation could set the standard instead. MENA’s first tokenisation platform, the world’s first government-backed tokenised title deed, investors from more than 50 nationalities, an AED 2,000 entry point. These are not only milestones for PRYPCO. They are evidence of what happens when innovation and regulation move together rather than against each other.
The keys to this market used to belong to a very small number of people. We built PRYPCO to hand a set of them back to everyone else.
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