UAE virtual asset licences have crossed a threshold almost no other jurisdiction can claim: 100 firms now hold active authorisations across five separate regulators running in parallel. A tracker published by UAE-based crypto law firm NeosLegal, and reported by Abu Dhabi’s Aletihad News Center, counts licensed entities across Dubai’s Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority (VARA), the Financial Services Regulatory Authority in ADGM, the DFSA in DIFC, the Central Bank of the UAE, and the federal Capital Market Authority. No other country currently operates five simultaneous, live virtual asset licensing regimes.
Key takeaways: 100 firms hold live UAE virtual asset authorisations; five regulators supervise them under different rulebooks; VARA licensees now also carry a CMA registration number following the January 2026 federal transition; and custody and institutional infrastructure are where the licence count is growing fastest.
What the 100-licence figure actually counts
The number is a census of active authorisations, not of companies with a Dubai office. That distinction matters. The UAE has spent three years absorbing firms that arrived with a marketing presence and no permission to serve clients, and the licence register is the only reliable way to separate the two. Each entry in the NeosLegal tracker lists the supervising regulator, the specific activities permitted, and the date the licence was granted — which turns it into a verification tool as much as a market statistic. An investor can check in seconds whether a platform is authorised to hold client assets or merely to advise.
It also explains why the headline count grows more slowly than announcements suggest. Provisional approvals, in-principle approvals and full operating licences are distinct stages, and firms routinely spend a year or more between them. The 100 figure reflects firms that have cleared the final gate.
Why UAE virtual asset licences now carry two regulator numbers
The most consequential change of the past year was federal, not emirate-level. Federal Decree-Law No. 32 of 2025 replaced the Securities and Commodities Authority with the Capital Market Authority, and Federal Decree-Law No. 33 of 2025 brought virtual assets inside the perimeter of regulated financial products. Both took effect on 1 January 2026. The practical result is that VARA-licensed firms in Dubai now display a CMA registration number alongside their VARA licence.
For compliance teams, that is a meaningful simplification. Before the transition, a firm licensed in Dubai had to negotiate its own path to serving clients elsewhere in the UAE. The federal-to-emirate linkage narrows that gap. It does not eliminate it — ADGM and DIFC remain separate common-law financial free zones with their own regulators — but it removes one of the more tedious frictions in the structure. We covered the underlying framework changes in our UAE and Gulf crypto timeline.
Five regulators, five different questions
The five regimes are not interchangeable, and choosing badly is expensive. VARA covers Dubai mainland and its economic free zones and has the broadest activity taxonomy, from broker-dealer and exchange services to custody, lending and advisory. ADGM’s FSRA has positioned itself around institutional counterparties, and its custody and fiat-referenced-token rules have attracted names including BitGo, Hex Trust and Komainu. The DFSA governs DIFC and, since its amended crypto token regime took effect on 12 January 2026, has shifted the burden of assessing token suitability onto licensed firms themselves rather than publishing a recognised-token list.
The Central Bank of the UAE sits outside that pattern entirely, supervising payment tokens and dirham-backed stablecoin issuance. The CMA covers federal investment-related virtual asset activity outside the two financial free zones. A tokenised fund raising institutional capital in DIFC answers to the DFSA; a dirham stablecoin issuer answers to the central bank. Same country, different rulebooks, different capital requirements.
Where the growth is concentrated
Custody is the clearest signal in the data. Institutional custodians do not set up in a jurisdiction speculatively; they follow client mandates. The presence of multiple licensed custodians alongside exchange and broker-dealer permissions suggests capital is being positioned rather than merely announced. Derivatives permissions have also widened, with VARA granting activity-specific approvals to exchanges that already hold spot licences — a sequence that regulators use to test operational resilience before expanding scope.
Tokenisation sits alongside it. Real-world asset issuance and stablecoin activity now form two of the three principal use cases regulators are licensing against, the third being conventional VASP operations. Our earlier analysis of UAE real estate tokenisation reaching scale tracks how that demand developed on the property side.
What it means
A hundred licences is a modest number against global trading volumes, and it should be read as a quality signal rather than a scale one. The UAE’s bet has never been on volume; it has been on being the jurisdiction where an institutional allocator can name its regulator, read its rulebook and get an enforceable answer. Five parallel regimes create real complexity for firms choosing where to sit, and that complexity is a cost. But it also means the country can supervise a stablecoin issuer, a custodian and a tokenised fund manager under rules written for each, rather than stretching one framework across all three.
The open question for the next twelve months is whether federal harmonisation continues past the CMA registration linkage into genuine passporting between regimes. Until it does, the licence count will keep growing faster than the number of firms that can serve the whole country from one authorisation.
Frequently asked questions
How many crypto firms are licensed in the UAE?
As of July 2026, 100 virtual asset entities hold active licences across the UAE’s five regulatory regimes: VARA, ADGM/FSRA, DFSA/DIFC, the Central Bank of the UAE, and the federal Capital Market Authority, according to the NeosLegal UAE VASP licence tracker.
Does a VARA licence let a firm operate across the whole UAE?
Not automatically. Since Federal Decree-Laws 32 and 33 of 2025 took effect on 1 January 2026, VARA-licensed firms carry a CMA registration number for federal recognition, but ADGM and DIFC remain separate financial free zones with their own regulators and licensing requirements.
Sources: Aletihad News Center, Dubai Financial Services Authority, Abu Dhabi Global Market.
This article is for information only and is not financial, investment or legal advice. Always do your own research and consult a licensed professional before making decisions.
