Coinbase announced on 11 August 2026 that it has established an international tokenisation hub in Abu Dhabi Global Market (ADGM), having secured a Financial Services Permission (FSP) from the Financial Services Regulatory Authority (FSRA). The permission enables the exchange to arrange investment deals and provide custody, the two key regulated activities required to establish and operate a market for tokenised securities. This marks one of the clearest indications yet that a major global exchange is prepared to bring tokenised equities directly within the regulatory perimeter, rather than issuing them on the periphery.
In its announcement, Coinbase framed the move as a strategic bet on Abu Dhabi’s early regulatory framework. Brett Tejpaul, Co-CEO of Coinbase Institutional, said:
"ADGM issued one of the world's first regulatory frameworks for virtual assets in 2018. That reflected a genuine institutional commitment to innovation-forward regulation, executed with the rigor that global financial markets require. No major financial center has yet built a framework that treats tokenized equities simultaneously as securities, blockchain-native tokens, and DeFi-composable assets."
The company positions the hub as the foundation for tokenised equities designed to mirror their underlying shares while existing natively onchain.
How the tokenised securities work
The mechanics are what make the permission notable. Under the ADGM regime, each token is registered and issued locally and collateralised one for one by the equity it represents, with the FSRA sitting as the direct supervisor of the arrangement.
Holders who clear verification receive the economic and governance entitlements attached to the shares. Dividends accrue to every holder and are automatically reinvested, while the vesting terms set out in each security's prospectus reserve certain rights, notably voting and redemption, for holders whose positions have vested. Investors hold the products in a digital wallet rather than through a traditional brokerage account or a banking relationship, which is the part of the design that most obviously departs from conventional capital markets.
Supervision is built into the plumbing rather than bolted on afterwards. Sanctions checks are applied continuously as the tokens change hands, and, on a regulator's instruction, Coinbase can immobilise or recover the holdings tied to a specific wallet. That combination, on-chain settlement paired with wallet-level control and continuous screening, is what allows a tokenised share to sit inside a licensed perimeter instead of outside it. For compliance teams, it is a working example of how issuer obligations, custody and market-integrity controls can be expressed in code while still answering to a named supervisor.
A two-track UAE strategy
The Abu Dhabi hub is only one half of Coinbase's push into the Emirates. The company is separately building a global derivatives hub in Dubai, run through Deribit, the derivatives venue Coinbase acquired, and supervised by Dubai's Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority (VARA) rather than the FSRA.
On or around 13 August 2026, Deribit secured a Broker-Dealer Licence from VARA that lets it route spot orders to Coinbase Exchange for execution, adding to the VARA Exchange Services licence it has held since January 2025, having run its global headquarters from Dubai under VARA supervision since the start of that year. The result is a deliberate split: regulated tokenised securities and on-chain capital markets in Abu Dhabi under the FSRA, and a derivatives operation in Dubai under VARA, giving Coinbase two distinct footholds across a single country.
That split reflects how the UAE has chosen to compete for digital-asset business, with Abu Dhabi and Dubai running separate but complementary regimes. ADGM has regulated virtual assets since 2018, when it became one of the earliest jurisdictions anywhere to put a dedicated framework in place, and it has leaned into tokenisation as the next stage of that work. Arvind Ramamurthy, Chief Market Development Officer at ADGM, said:
"Coinbase's establishment of its international tokenisation hub in ADGM is a strong endorsement of Abu Dhabi's growing role in shaping the future of global finance. It reflects the strength of ADGM's progressive, robust and internationally aligned regulatory framework, which continues to provide leading global institutions with the confidence to develop responsible, blockchain-enabled financial services at scale."
Why it matters for regulated markets
Tokenised securities have spent years in pilots and private placements, and independent market trackers put the on-chain real-world-asset pool in the tens of billions of dollars and climbing, but much of that activity has sat in structures. Bringing an exchange of Coinbase's size under an FSRA permission to issue and custody tokenised shares moves the model into a supervised lane, closer to the tailored framework that other authorities are now drafting for on-chain instruments, including the SEC's proposed Regulation Crypto Assets in the United States and the earlier work behind on-chain funds such as Franklin Templeton's BENJI.
Two caveats keep this development in proportion. First, the announcement is an opening gambit; the release frames it as an initial step and groundwork for a future rollout. Second, no issuers, listed companies, or funds have been named yet. This leaves the critical test of whether investors will actively buy and trade tokenised shares through a digital wallet at meaningful scale.
While industry surveys indicate growing institutional appetite for tokenisation, stated interest is not the same as live trading volume, and bridging that gap is precisely what a regulated venue must now achieve. For now, Abu Dhabi has secured the oversight framework and a marquee brand to anchor it, strengthening its bid to become the premier hub for onchain capital markets.
