The UAE’s Innovation City free zone in Ras Al Khaimah has introduced a blockchain-based system that grants every registered company a sovereign, cryptographically verifiable digital identity on-chain, replacing traditional static business licenses.
The system runs on OPN Chain, an EVM-compatible layer-1 blockchain developed by UAE-based IOPn using the Cosmos SDK, with performance exceeding 10,000 transactions per second and sub-second finality. The launch covers the free zone’s existing base of over 1,000 registered companies, converting their licenses from paper or PDF records into persistent, soulbound digital assets that can be audited and verified without centralized intermediaries.
“Today we don’t just register companies, we give them a soul on the blockchain,” said Paul Dawalibi, CEO of Innovation City, emphasizing that traditional identity systems are too slow and opaque for modern needs. Mojtaba Asadian, CEO of IOPn, called OPN Chain the “sovereign infrastructure layer enabling the UAE’s agentic AI economy,” designed to scale across jurisdictions and sectors.
The move aligns with the UAE government’s directive to transition 50% of federal services to agentic AI within two years, which requires machine-readable, autonomously verifiable business identities. Innovation City expects the on-chain IDs to reduce document fraud, eliminate manual verification delays, and streamline licensing, compliance, and taxation processes. However, no specific banks, regulators, or exchanges have yet been named as parties accepting or integrating the credentials, leaving real-world portability dependent on future institutional onboarding.
