Gold, Stocks, and Real Estate: How MENA Is Tokenizing the World’s Most Coveted Assets

The Middle East and North Africa are quietly becoming the world’s most consequential laboratory for tokenizing gold, real estate, and equities. Moreover, its regulators are deliberately building the runway for it.

In 2026, MENA is co-authoring tokenization frameworks alongside the industry itself, with gold reserves, luxury real estate, and stock market access all moving on-chain.

MENA’s Regulatory Edge: Building With Industry, Not Against It

In an X space hosted by BeInCrypto, executives from MEXC, OKX Ventures, ChangeNOW, and Zoomex converged on one point: MENA’s regulatory philosophy is what separates it from every other major financial hub.

Vugar Usi Zade, COO of MEXC and a 14-year Dubai resident, drew the contrast plainly. European regulators waited for the Cambridge Analytica scandal before drafting GDPR. They waited years before producing MiCA. Middle Eastern regulators, by contrast, onboard industry leaders into the consultation process from the start.

The practical results are already visible. The UAE allows employers to pay salaries in crypto — legally. The Dubai Multi Commodities Centre (DMCC) is building a tokenized gold and silver infrastructure designed for institutional scale. And the Dubai Land Department has publicly committed to tokenizing 30% of the emirate’s entire real estate market within the next decade.

“In the Middle East, it’s not just building a framework for businesses to operate. Today, in the UAE, you can pay salaries in crypto. It is accepted as a legal way of paying for talent. In parallel, the Dubai Land Department is actually rolling out fractional real estate, and they predict that in the next decade, it will reach around 30% of their entire real estate market,” Vugar Usi Zade told BeInCrypto.

That global ambition is the key distinction. Dubai isn’t tokenizing real estate to serve local buyers. It’s building infrastructure to attract international capital, and tokenization is the mechanism that makes fractional, borderless property ownership possible.

For retail investors, the appeal of MENA’s tokenization push is increasingly practical. Usi Zade described how MEXC’s 40 million users — largely crypto-native — are now moving into tokenized gold, silver, and US equities, not out of TradFi curiosity, but to hedge against crypto market volatility.

Previously, accessing these asset classes required separate infrastructure: a brokerage account for stocks, a bank relationship for gold exposure, a property agent and legal team for real estate. Tokenization collapses all of that into a single platform.

Ray Xiao, Investment Director at OKX Ventures, pointed to the exchange’s partnership with Ondo Finance as a live example of what this looks like in practice. The collaboration brings more than 100 US stocks and ETFs on-chain, allowing retail users to buy fractional shares of Apple or Tesla at 10 PM on a Sunday, outside market hours, without a brokerage account.

For institutional players, Xiao noted that the logic is operational. When KKR or Apollo tokenizes a private equity fund, smart contracts automatically manage the cap table, distribute dividends, and handle KYC compliance. The efficiency gains alone justify the move, independent of any ideological commitment to blockchain.

“The main value of tokenization boils down to fractionalization, programmability, and global 24/7 liquidity,” Xiao told BeInCrypto.

OKX Ventures is also actively pursuing partnerships with platforms like Centrifuge and Securitize, which bring tokenized private credit and private equity structures to crypto-native audiences, extending the asset class menu well beyond gold and public equities.

Self-Custody: The Killer Feature Traditional Finance Can’t Replicate

Pauline Shangett, Chief Strategy Officer at ChangeNOW, identified the feature of tokenized real-world assets that no broker or bank can match: self-custody.

Shangett admitted to being a long-standing skeptic of RWAs, viewing earlier enthusiasm as short-term opportunism. But the current bear market has validated the thesis. As altcoins crash and digital asset treasuries liquidate positions bought at peak prices, Web3 investors are rotating into tokenized commodities and stocks as genuine stores of value, and non-custodial platforms let them hold those assets in their own wallets, without counterparty exposure.

“You don’t have to entrust your assets to a broker anymore or to a bank,” Shangett said. “You can just keep them on your wallet and in your portfolio.”

This matters especially in markets where access to Western brokerages is restricted or legally complex. Tokenization doesn’t just make gold and stocks cheaper to access — in parts of MENA and beyond, it makes them accessible at all.

Fernando Lillo Aranda, Marketing Director at Zoomex, raised a challenge the industry still needs to solve: convincing traditional Web2 traders to trust centralized exchanges as custodians of tokenized real-world assets. Building that trust, he argued, is the communications and product problem that will define which platforms win the next wave of users.

What Comes Next

Three developments will determine how quickly MENA’s tokenization ambitions materialize. First, the pace of the Dubai Land Department’s fractional real estate rollout — a 30% target is a policy commitment, not yet a market reality. 

Second, whether DMCC’s gold tokenization infrastructure achieves the liquidity depth needed to attract institutional allocation. 

Third, how quickly exchange partnerships like OKX-Ondo Finance scale to cover broader asset classes including commodities, fixed income, and private credit.

As BlackRock CEO Larry Fink has stated, everything will eventually be tokenized. In MENA, the question is no longer whether — it’s how fast, and who builds the infrastructure that the rest of the world ends up using.