Proof of Progress: Inside Arbeat's Plan to Trade Tokenized Assets 24/7

Blockchain, as an industry, has come a very long way. The old "you're early to crypto" line has quietly died, because the world is now visibly moving on-chain: tokenized real-world assets crossed $30 billion in June, roughly four times where they stood a year ago. What hasn't matured is the exit.

Almost anything can be bought on-chain today. The catch is, selling it around the clock isn’t as easy, and Khaled Guerbouz, CEO of Arbeat Group, has built his entire company around that gap.

Tokenized real-world assets (RWAs) crossed $30 billion on-chain in June 2026, excluding stablecoins, according to recent data from RWA.xyz, spread across nearly 947,000 holders. For scale, the entire crypto market is worth about $2.05 trillion, per CoinGecko.

Forecasts for where tokenization lands by the next decade run from McKinsey's conservative $2 trillion to Standard Chartered's $30 trillion by 2034. The range is wide because nobody agrees on what counts. The direction is not in dispute.

Almost all of that growth, however, has been in issuance. Putting an asset on-chain is now routine. Trading it afterward is not, and that gap is the one Guerbouz keeps coming back to.

"Those assets are being tokenized, there is a lot of interest, people are buying into it," the Arbeat founder and chief executive tells Block Insider. "There's no secondary-market infrastructure that allows round-the-clock trading. Those mechanics are not applied yet."

Guerbouz spent more than 15 years building institutional trading businesses in foreign exchange (FX) and commodities across the Gulf before moving to digital assets. His read is that crypto spent a decade perfecting the easy half of the problem. Retail apps made buying a coin effortless, and selling a tokenized asset whenever the holder wants remains mostly a grey area.

Why Can You Buy Tokenized Assets but Not Sell Them?

The claim needs a caveat, because Dubai is one of the few places already chipping at it. In February 2026, the Dubai Land Department launched a 24/7 secondary market for tokenized property through the PRYPCO Mint platform, letting holders trade roughly 7.8 million real-estate tokens around the clock. So the wall is not total.

It is asset-class-specific. Fractional real estate now has a regulated venue; most other tokenized assets do not. Guerbouz's own example is a commodity. "A tokenized bar of gold can be bought today," he says, "but not sold around the clock, because that implies a particular design: a liquidity pool to be created and governed, different stakeholders brought together."

For a retail crypto user, the contrast is sharp. Most tokens can be swapped on a decentralized exchange (DEX) at 3 a.m. A tokenized gram of gold usually has no such venue.

Guerbouz frames the fix as coordination, not code.

"It comes down to bringing the regulator, asset owners, liquidity providers, market makers, and stablecoin issuers together to fill the few gaps left," he says.

Arbeat says it has designed a model to supply that liquidity once operational, but Guerbouz declined to detail it. The single claim the venture rests on, in other words, is the one no one outside the company has seen.

What Is Arbeat Building Under One Roof?

Arbeat's structure is built around that gap. Guerbouz describes four connected layers: a virtual-asset exchange; an over-the-counter (OTC) desk for converting between fiat and stablecoins such as USDT and USDC; digital payment rails for moving dirhams (AED) and dollars on and off-chain; and tokenization, the issuance and distribution of real-world assets.

His case for bundling is operational. "Today digital interactions are fractionalized," he says. "You use an exchange to trade, a broker-dealer to convert fiat to crypto, another company to tokenize. That creates more counterparties, more complexity." His analogy is a supermarket: buy everything under one roof instead of visiting the vegetable shop, then the dairy shop, then somewhere else.

"We want institutions to feel they're dealing with financial market infrastructure, not just another crypto platform."

The open question is whether four services under one license trade better than four specialists, or whether it is simply one vendor in place of four. No operator has yet proven the bundled model faster or safer at scale, and the competition is not standing still: Dubai's regulator has issued about 50 virtual-asset licenses, and global exchanges including OKX and Binance operate under it.

Why Did Arbeat Choose Dubai's VARA?

Arbeat was built specifically for the Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority (VARA), Dubai's dedicated virtual-asset regulator, rather than the broader financial regulators in the DIFC or Abu Dhabi's ADGM free zones.

"All the activities we want to cover fall under it," Guerbouz says. "I don't think there is any other regulator in the world with that level of specificity."

He describes the relationship more warmly than most founders describe a watchdog:

"We see the regulator as a supervisory partner, rather than police on top of our head."

That regime is also why "approved" needs careful reading. VARA runs a two-stage process: an in-principle approval, then a full operating license once a firm passes testing. By the end of 2025, 39 of the roughly 50 licensed firms were fully operational. Arbeat is not yet among them.

"We're ready, we've been tested across the board," Guerbouz says. "We're just waiting for the final feedback from the regulator." Until VARA signs off, Arbeat cannot open.

What Has to Go Right for Arbeat?

Strip it back and Arbeat is one honest sentence: a pre-launch venture betting it can build the cross-asset secondary market that, real estate aside, barely exists yet. Three things have to land. VARA has to grant the full license. The undisclosed liquidity model has to work in the open. And the bundled approach has to beat the specialists it is up against.

The funding posture is unusual for the sector. "We're well capitalized and well funded, with a plan to deploy our capital in stages," Guerbouz says. "We're not a typical startup chasing funding every quarter to survive." He says the shareholders own other businesses and bring operational support, though he did not name them.

What Guerbouz has, that a pure-tech founder often lacks, is a precise read on where the gap sits, and the patience to say the product is not ready rather than oversell it. Asked what success looks like by the end of 2027, he first jokes "unicorn," then lands somewhere slower:

"We're here for the long term. We want to build confidence in the market, build a brand and an infrastructure under the most credible regulator," and eventually "to empower the digital economy of the country."

That is the Proof of Progress test in nutshell: the market has proven it can put $30 billion on-chain. Whether it can trade what it minted is the next chapter, and when Arbeat goes live, the "now we're trading" story is the one worth coming back for.