The Middle East and North Africa are becoming the world’s most important testing ground for the tokenization of gold, real estate, and stocks. Moreover, its regulators are intentionally building its runways.
In 2026, MENA will collaborate with the industry itself to create a tokenization framework, and access to gold reserves, luxury real estate, and stock markets will all move on-chain.
MENA’s regulatory advantage: building with industry, not against it
Hosted by BeInCrypto, X Space brought together executives from MEXC, OKX Ventures, ChangeNOW, and Zoomex at one point. That’s what sets MENA’s regulatory philosophy apart from other major financial hubs.
Vugar Usi Zade, chief operating officer of MEXC and a resident of Dubai for 14 years, made this contrast clear. European regulators waited until the Cambridge Analytica scandal before drafting the GDPR. They waited years to produce MiCA. In contrast, regulators in the Middle East involve industry leaders in the consultation process from the beginning.
The real results are already visible. The UAE legally allows employers to pay salaries in cryptocurrencies. Dubai Multi Commodities Center (DMCC) is building a tokenized gold and silver infrastructure designed for institutional scale. And Dubai Land Department has pledged to tokenize 30% of the emirate’s entire real estate market within the next 10 years.
“In the Middle East, it’s not just about building a framework for running a business. Today, salaries can be paid in cryptocurrencies in the UAE, which is accepted as a legitimate way of paying talent. In parallel, the Dubai Land Authority is actually developing fractional real estate, which we predict will reach around 30% of the total real estate market in the next 10 years,” Wugha Usi Zadeh told BeInCrypto.
Its global ambitions are the key difference. Dubai is not tokenizing real estate to serve local buyers. We are building the infrastructure to attract international capital, and tokenization is a mechanism that enables fragmented and borderless real estate ownership.
For retail investors, the appeal of the MENA tokenization drive is becoming increasingly real. Usi Zade explained how MEXC’s 40 million users (mostly crypto natives) are currently moving into tokenized gold, silver, and US stocks, not out of TradFi curiosity, but to avoid volatility in the crypto market.
Previously, accessing these asset classes required separate infrastructure, such as brokerage accounts for stocks, banking relationships for gold exposure, and real estate agents and legal teams for real estate. Tokenization brings all of this into a single platform.
Ray Xiao, investment director at OKX Ventures, cited the exchange’s partnership with Ondo Finance as an example of what this looks like in practice. The partnership will bring over 100 US stocks and ETFs on-chain, allowing retail users to buy fractional shares of Apple or Tesla on Sundays at 10pm, after market hours, without having a brokerage account.
Xiao pointed out that for institutional investors, the logic is working. When KKR or Apollo tokenizes a private equity fund, smart contracts automatically manage cap tables, distribute dividends, and handle KYC compliance. Regardless of ideological commitments to blockchain, the efficiency gains alone justify this move.
“The main value of tokenization boils down to fragmentation, programmability, and global 24/7 liquidity,” Xiao told BeInCrypto.
OKX Ventures is also actively pursuing partnerships with platforms such as Centrifuge and Securitize to bring tokenized private credit and private equity structures to crypto-native users, expanding the menu of asset classes far beyond gold and public equities.
Self-custody: A killer feature that cannot be replicated in traditional finance
Pauline Shanget, chief strategy officer at ChangeNOW, identified self-custody as a characteristic of tokenized real-world assets that no broker or bank can imitate.
Shanget admitted that he has long been skeptical of RWAs and views previous enthusiasm as short-term opportunism. But the current bear market confirms that hypothesis. As altcoins plummet and digital asset treasuries liquidate positions bought at peak prices, Web3 investors are turning to tokenized products and stocks as a true store of value, and non-custodial platforms allow them to hold those assets in their own wallets without exposure to counterparties.
“You no longer need to entrust your assets to a broker or bank,” Shanget says. “You can just keep it in your wallet or portfolio.”
This is especially important in markets where access to Western brokerages is limited or legally complex. Tokenization will not only make access to gold and stocks cheaper, but in parts of MENA and beyond, it will make them accessible at all.
Fernando Lillo Aranda, director of marketing at Zoomex, cited a challenge the industry still has to overcome: convincing traditional Web2 traders to trust centralized exchanges as custodians of their tokenized real-world assets. Building that trust, he argued, is a matter of communication and product that will determine which platforms will capture the next wave of users.
what happens next
Three developments will determine how quickly MENA’s tokenization ambitions become a reality. First is the pace of Dubai Land Department’s piecemeal real estate development. The 30% target is a policy promise, not yet a market reality.
Second, whether DMCC’s gold tokenization infrastructure achieves the depth of liquidity necessary to attract allocation by institutional investors.
Third, how exchange partnerships like OKX-Ondo Finance can quickly expand to cover a broader range of asset classes, including commodities, fixed income, and private credit.
As BlackRock CEO Larry Fink has stated, eventually everything will be tokenized. In MENA, the question is no longer about if, but who and how fast will build the infrastructure that will ultimately be used by the rest of the world.
The post “Gold, stocks, real estate: How MENA is tokenizing the world’s most coveted assets” was first published on BeInCrypto.