In an extensive interview with CoinDesk, Faisal Monai said that while the world is still debating tokenization, Saudi Arabia will have proven that financial systems can be onchain. Faisal Monai, the architect of the Saudi kingdom's modern financial plumbing. (Faisal Monai/Press Team)

What to know:

• Faisal Monai, the architect of Saudi Arabia's digital payments system, is now leading a $12.5 billion push to tokenize real-world assets through droppRWA, starting with real estate.

• He predicts that by 2030 Saudi Arabia will operate a nationwide, sovereign-grade tokenized financial system that other G20 countries will emulate, with stablecoin-based real estate settlement going live by late 2026.

• Monai argues that tokenization will give Gulf economies greater resilience and certainty in times of global volatility, complementing rather than replacing the U.S. dollar while building always-on, regulated settlement infrastructure.

Faisal Monai, chair of Saudi Arabia's largest tokenization platform, believed in digital payments years before bitcoin's inception in 2009. By 2007, he had already led the transition of the Saudi Arabian kingdom's $4 trillion cash-heavy payments system into a digital network.