Abu Dhabi’s bid to become a global hub for digital assets got a major boost last week when crypto exchange giant, Coinbase, announced it is establishing an international “tokenization hub” in the emirate.
Based out of Abu Dhabi Global Market (ADGM), the emirate’s financial centre, Coinbase has been granted a license to arrange investment deals and provide custody for tokenized securities. Custody essentially means safely holding and managing the digital ownership records for assets and is therefore important for giving institutional investors confidence.
Tokenization has been rapidly gaining momentum across traditional finance globally, with major asset managers and banks increasingly bringing funds, bonds, private credit and equities onto blockchain infrastructure.
Abu Dhabi has emerged as a key testing ground for this transition.
ADGM introduced one of the world’s first comprehensive virtual asset regulatory frameworks back in 2018 and has since attracted a steady wave of crypto and tokenization firms looking to establish a regulated base in the region.
In December last year, the ADGM granted Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange by trading volume, a license to operate from the financial centre. CoinMarketCap’s June 2026 data shows Binance’s trading volume stood at $4.74 trillion—equivalent to 39.5% of trading volume across the 11 exchanges it tracks, well ahead of its competitors.
Over 20 firms now hold active virtual asset licences in the ADGM today.
For Coinbase, the company is betting that more of the world’s financial system will eventually move onto blockchain—and it wants Abu Dhabi to be at the centre of that change.
“Coinbase locating its international tokenisation hub in ADGM is the kind of licence that turns tokenized securities from a pilot into a market,” UAE-based Adam Popat, CEO of SettleMint, which helps regulated institutions design, issue, and manage digital assets across the full lifecycle on one platform, told Fortune.
“When a listed U.S. exchange chooses Abu Dhabi for that work, it tells issuers and allocators that the UAE now has the regulatory depth to host global issuance, not only regional experiments.”
Popat relocated from London to the UAE last year to take up the CEO role, having previously served as SettleMint’s CFO. Prior to that, he led Standard Chartered’s adoption of digital assets and blockchain technology.
“I would say the UAE is one of the leading lights when it comes to tokenization, not just in this region, but globally,” he said.
“It was very obvious to us that this region was going to be one of the key drivers of the adoption of this technology; there’s a confluence of factors here which are making that possible.”
Popat highlighted the GCC’s ambitious national-scale programs to digitize all aspects of the economy, its deep capital pools, and increasingly, deep pools of talent, as well as a collaborative regulatory environment.
“That’s a set of ingredients which allows the digital asset agenda to move at pace here. And over the last year that I’ve been here, we’ve definitely seen that play out,” he said.
“In terms of our client base, pipeline, partnerships—a lot of it is now being driven through this region.”
According to Popat, SettleMint is currently in talks with all the large banks in the UAE which are both exploring and progressing initiatives around tokenizing equities, funds, bonds and deposits.
He added that tokenization of gold is “a very active conversation” that the company is also currently having with several partners.
In May, SettleMint signed a strategic partnership with ADI Foundation to develop a digital asset lifestyle infrastructure on ADI Chain, the Foundation’s institutional blockchain, supporting the tokenization of securities under the ADGM’s regulatory framework.
In doing so, they seek to address a core challenge facing institutional adoption of digital assets: the need for coordinated, regulated infrastructure that connects issuance, trading, settlement, and custody within a single recognized framework.
ADI Foundation is an Abu Dhabi-based organization creating blockchain infrastructure that aims to bring one billion people into the digital economy by 2030.
“The ADI Foundation is one of the organizations coming out of Abu Dhabi, which is building a very ambitious digital asset ecosystem that encompasses a lot of different financial institutions and corporates in the emirate,” said Popat.
“So, they’ve really bought into the opportunity of digital assets, and we were obviously delighted to have been chosen by them as their lead tokenization and digital asset lifecycle partner for their ecosystem.”
In July, ADI Foundation announced that ADI Chain had secured a $50 million strategic investment, marking a major milestone for one of the region’s fastest-growing institutional blockchain ecosystems.
The funding is expected to support ADI Chain’s international expansion across the Middle East, Africa and Asia, where governments and financial institutions are increasingly exploring blockchain infrastructure to modernize payment systems, digitize public services and support emerging digital economies.
The ecosystem is also seeing the rollout of DDSC, a dirham-pegged stablecoin developed through a collaboration between First Abu Dhabi Bank, International Holding Company and Sirius International Holding.
The UAE has also been leveraging its sovereign wealth funds to invest in tokenization.
Last, month, Mubadala Capital, the asset management arm of Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund, tokenized one of its private-market investment strategies through UAE-based infrastructure provider KAIO on blockchain including Base, with Coinbase also taking an exposure to the fund.
Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, completed its first sovereign-native tokenized title-deed transfer in early 2026, while the Qatar Financial Centre is taking steps to enable real estate tokenization.
In a report published in January this year, global consulting firm Kearney estimated that by 2030, close to $500 billion in assets across the GCC could be represented on blockchain, comprising private markets, funds, bank deposits, public equities, real estate, and commodities.
Of these, it believes that private markets represent the largest tokenization opportunity for the GCC, which it estimates could reach $154 billion in market size by 2030.
The firm noted that these asset classes point to a market with significant headroom for growth—one that could hold a meaningful share of the region’s investable assets, reshaping how capital is issued, traded and allocated.
“This suggests a fundamental shift in market dynamics, and explains why governments, financial institutions, and asset managers are beefing up their digital asset strategies,” it said.
The post How the UAE has emerged as a ‘leading light’ for tokenization appeared first on Fortune.
