The project
At Ripple I ran the Hong Kong mortgage tokenization pilot with a commercial bank and the HKMA. The goal was to make home equity lending faster and cheaper: Reuters reported the pilot aimed to halve a loan approval process that takes about a month, in a HK$1.8 trillion mortgage market.
What we built
We hit a hard limit early: the land registry could not be tokenized. So we tokenized the mortgage instead. A loan secured over a property could be released, drawn on and repaid by rules rather than paperwork, with settlement in e-HKD, Hong Kong's pilot central bank digital currency.
What I took from it
Hong Kong tested the loan layer. Dubai and Saudi Arabia are now putting property title onto digital infrastructure. Connect the two and a homeowner can draw on growing equity in minutes rather than months, with the mortgage still issued by a traditional bank.
Further reading
- My article: The Mortgage of the Future: When Real Estate Becomes a Programmable Asset
- Ripple: real estate asset tokenization in the HKMA e-HKD pilot (May 2023)
- The Asset: HKMA completes e-HKD pilot (Oct 2025)
Digital assets & payments · Singapore