Overview
- Coinbase disclosed Tuesday that the Abu Dhabi Global Market’s Financial Services Regulatory Authority granted it Financial Services Permission to operate an international tokenization hub in ADGM, allowing the firm to arrange investment deals and provide custody for tokenized securities.
- Under the permission, Coinbase can issue and register digital securities in ADGM that are backed by underlying shares and held under FSRA oversight, with verified token holders able to receive shareholder economic rights depending on each offering's terms.
- The company says investors will not need a brokerage account to buy these tokenized securities and can use a crypto wallet to participate, while every transfer will face ongoing sanctions screening and the platform can freeze assets at the wallet level when required.
- Reporting also notes Coinbase has taken on-chain exposure to a Mubadala Capital tokenized private-markets fund, with one outlet reporting roughly $75 million of on-chain exposure; that figure is reported rather than disclosed by Coinbase.
- The approval deepens Coinbase’s UAE footprint alongside its Dubai derivatives business and builds on ADGM’s virtual-asset framework from 2018, a setup that could speed settlement, enable 24/7 trading and make traditional securities easier to use as onchain collateral.