Dubai Holding

Dubai Holding did not reach me through a pitch. In 2021 I founded Unlimitart, a fund dedicated to collecting digital art. I brought in a first investor, who brought in other private investors, and those investors made money through the wallet. One of them, Omar Karim, was at Dubai Holding at the time.

The advisory began in October 2021 and ran until June 2023. It was a separate engagement from the fund. What carried over was trust: judgment that had been tested on digital art, with real capital at stake, was now asked to work on a far heavier asset.

The scope covered tokenomics and a model for tokenizing real estate. Tokenizing property is easy to describe as fractional ownership: cut the asset into tokens and sell them. That version changes who can buy. It does not change how the asset produces value.

The question I worked on was the second one. What can a property do on-chain that it cannot do in a land registry?

The model proposed smart-contract mechanisms through which a property generates royalties on its subsequent sales. In a conventional transaction, the value a building creates is captured once, at the sale, and every later appreciation belongs to the next owner alone. With a royalty written into the contract, a share of each later sale flows back under rules set once, at issuance, with no renegotiation.

The mechanism comes from digital art. Royalties on secondary sales were one of the ideas that made NFTs matter to artists, and I had spent 2021 collecting inside that market. Moving the logic from an artwork to a building reframes real-estate value as something that continues beyond a single transaction.

A model like this has to answer hard questions before it answers technical ones: what the token represents in law and in practice, who is entitled to the royalty, how long the entitlement lasts, and whether buyers accept a price that carries a permanent share for someone else.

My contribution was the advice and the model. What a holding company then chose to build was its own decision.

What the case does show is how the work moved. Conviction about digital art produced a fund. The fund produced trust. The trust produced a mandate in a different asset class, and the mandate asked for the same discipline as the fund: find where the value actually sits before deciding how to package it.