Saudi Arabia has just crossed a major threshold in the tokenization of real-world assets, and it has done so without outsourcing the administration of its legal system.
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Saudi Arabia has completed the world’s first end-to-end tokenized real estate certificate transaction using droppRWA’s sovereign-grade infrastructure. Settlements that once took days were reduced to seconds, but ownership, compliance, and legal enforcement remained firmly locked in the Saudi state.
Registry as truth, not a digital wrapper
What makes this transaction different from previous “tokenized real estate” experiments is where the authority resides.
Saudi has integrated the Real Estate Registry (RER) directly into the transaction layer. This means that the blockchain runs in sync with the registry, rather than next to it. Transfers of ownership, compliance checks, and delivery-versus-payment settlements were all encoded into the infrastructure itself.
In practice, this transforms Saudi real estate from a traditionally illiquid asset class into a programmable and investable infrastructure, while keeping the keys to the national registry firmly in the hands of the sovereign.
How the transaction works
The transaction was executed between the National Housing Company (NHC) and the Real Estate Development Fund (REDF), two foundational institutions of Saudi Arabia’s housing ecosystem.
Using droppRWA’s infrastructure:
Tokenized real estate certificates were issued and cryptographically linked to the official records of the RER.
Separate ownership tokens now allow for legal transfer
Compliance rules are now embedded directly in the forwarding logic
Payments are made through a stable delivery-to-payment mechanism, ensuring atomic and secure execution.
The result is an immediate settlement that is fully legally enforceable.
2030 Vision Moment
The transaction was completed under the auspices of Saudi Arabia’s Minister of Urban Affairs and Housing Majid Al Hugeir, and is directly aligned with Vision 2030’s goals on digital infrastructure, foreign investment, and capital market modernization.
“Saudi Arabia is building a real estate sector that is digital by design. By directly linking transactions to official records from the outset, this will widen participation, strengthen FDI confidence, improve liquidity and enable new PropTech innovations.”
Majid Al Khogeir, Minister of Rural Housing, Saudi Arabia
Unlike other countries that have introduced regulatory frameworks but whose enforcement remains fragmented, Saudi Arabia has introduced technical codes at the registration level. This is the first time this has happened in the G20 economies.
Skip the “digital rapper” era
According to Faisal Al‑Monai, CEO of DroppRWA, this is exactly the point.
“Our goal is to help Saudi Arabia overcome the ‘digital wrapper’ era that other markets have fallen into,” Almonai said. “By embedding legal enforcement into source assets, we are creating a new category of sovereign-class assets and an industrial engine that will allow the world’s institutional capital to access Saudi Arabia’s multi-trillion dollar real estate pipeline with absolute legal certainty.”
Mr. Faisal Almonai, CEO of droppRWA
DroppRWA’s model encodes legal, compliance, payments, and registry permissions directly into the infrastructure rather than retrofitting blockchain to traditional processes.
what happens next
Following this successful implementation, this infrastructure is expected to be rolled out more widely across Saudi Arabia’s multi-trillion dollar real estate pipeline, including designated investment regions.
While regions such as the UK, EU and Singapore are laying the regulatory foundations, Saudi Arabia is introducing registry-native tokenization for the first time on a national scale, turning real estate into a liquid, programmable asset class without giving up sovereignty.
