Coinbase says it has an Abu Dhabi licence for tokenized securities

Coinbase announced on Tuesday that it has received a Financial Services Permission from the Financial Services Regulatory Authority (FSRA) of Abu Dhabi Global Market, and will use the emirate as the base for an international tokenization business, according to CoinDesk's report of the company's statement.

The permission covers two regulated activities: arranging deals in investments, and providing custody. Coinbase told CoinDesk it plans to issue and register digital securities in ADGM, under FSRA supervision, backed by underlying shares — in other words, tokenized equity, wrapped and administered offshore of the United States.

The hub joins a UAE footprint Coinbase has been assembling for three years. Its derivatives business sits in Dubai. In 2023, its asset management arm launched Project Diamond, a facility for institutional issuance and trading of digital debt instruments on Base, Coinbase's own Ethereum layer-2. In July 2026, per CoinDesk, Mubadala Capital — the asset management arm of Abu Dhabi's sovereign wealth fund — tokenized one of its private-markets strategies via UAE infrastructure firm KAIO, on blockchains including Base, with Coinbase taking exposure to the fund itself.

ADGM has run a virtual-asset regulatory framework since 2018 and has courted tokenization firms since.

Key facts

• Licence: Financial Services Permission from ADGM's FSRA, covering arranging investment deals and custody of tokenized securities — announced by Coinbase, reported by CoinDesk, 11 August 2026.
• Product: digital securities backed by underlying shares, to be registered and issued in ADGM (Coinbase, via CoinDesk).
• Existing UAE presence: derivatives business in Dubai; Project Diamond, launched 2023 on Base (CoinDesk).
• Mubadala Capital tokenized a private-markets strategy through KAIO in July 2026, on chains including Base, with Coinbase taking fund exposure (CoinDesk).
• ADGM's virtual-asset framework dates to 2018 (CoinDesk).

The real-world read

Everything concrete here is Coinbase describing Coinbase. The announcement, the strategic framing and the product description all originate with the company; CoinDesk is relaying them. The FSRA's public register — not the press cycle — is where the scope of the permission can actually be checked, and no register entry or regulator statement appears alongside the announcement.

Brett Tejpaul, co-CEO of Coinbase Institutional, is quoted saying no major financial center has built a framework treating tokenized equities as securities, blockchain-native tokens and DeFi-composable assets at once. That is a sales pitch with a claim inside it, and the claim is unverified: no rulebook or FSRA guidance is cited to show ADGM has done what he says nobody has.

Conspicuously absent: any launch date, any named listed shares, any fee or custody structure, any statement of who may buy these tokens or from which jurisdictions — and no word on whether U.S. persons are excluded, which is the point of building this outside the U.S. in the first place. Also worth noting: Coinbase is an investor in a fund tokenized partly on the chain Coinbase built, which makes it customer, infrastructure and now venue.

Opinion, and whose

The only opinion on offer is Tejpaul's regulatory-gap claim, above — an interested party's view of his own new licence. CoinDesk's framing that tokenization is "gaining traction" across traditional finance is the outlet's characterization, offered without figures.

Sources

• CoinDesk, "Coinbase picks Abu Dhabi for its global tokenized asset push," 11 August 2026 — sole source for the licence, the product description, the Dubai and Project Diamond background, the Mubadala/KAIO transaction and the Tejpaul quote. Secondary throughout; its underlying source is Coinbase's own announcement. The same page carried an unrelated promotional module for a Zcash research feature, which is not reporting and is not used here.

Nothing here is financial advice.