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## Commercial Activity Two dated commercial events occurred in the UAE's crypto and digital-asset market in October 2026. Payward FZCO, Kraken's UAE entity, received VARA Full Market Approval on 12 October 2026, completing a licensing process VARA's register shows began in May 2026, with the exchange's parent Payward Inc. domiciled in the United States. Kraken is reported to plan an AED-denominated spot and margin trading launch, alongside staking, tokenised equities, and crypto payments, within weeks of the approval. Separately, Standard Chartered, a UK-domiciled global bank, launched live institutional custody of Ripple's RLUSD stablecoin via its DIFC branch regulated by the Dubai Financial Services Authority, also dated 12 October 2026, with a planned collateral-mirroring link to LMAX Group reported as not yet live. Neither event discloses a transaction value. Both events represent market entry or product-line expansion by firms headquartered outside the UAE into the UAE's licensed digital-asset market, consistent with the jurisdiction's posture of actively courting major global exchanges and banks into its regulatory perimeter. The two events sit on separate regulatory tracks, VARA for exchange licensing and the DFSA for the Standard Chartered custody product, but both were reported and corroborated through multiple independent press sources, giving reasonable confidence in the underlying commercial facts even though neither was separately confirmed against a primary regulator source this cycle. ## Outlook Continued commercial market entry and product expansion by globally-domiciled exchanges and banks into the UAE's crypto and digital-asset market is a plausible continuation of this cycle's pattern. Whether Kraken's reported near-term product launches proceed as described, and whether Standard Chartered's planned LMAX collateral-mirroring link becomes operational, remain open items.
Commercial Activity
Bybit Fintech FZE, the Dubai-domiciled unit of the Bybit exchange group, secured a Virtual Asset Service Provider licence from Dubai's Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority for Exchange Services, covering spot trading. The grant was reported on 21-22 October 2026 and is treated as a completed market-entry event: the licence has been issued and the regulatory review by the Authority is recorded as cleared, with Bybit Fintech FZE named as licensee and the broader Bybit group named as a related party.
No financial terms attach to this event, as a licence grant rather than a commercial transaction. The scope of authorisation is specific: Exchange Services covering spot trading, rather than a broader suite of virtual-asset activities. The event confirms Bybit's formal entry into the Dubai-licensed virtual asset exchange market under the Authority's existing supervisory framework, rather than reflecting any change to that framework.
Outlook
The licence positions Bybit Fintech FZE to operate spot trading exchange services from Dubai under the Authority's supervision going forward. Whether the scope of authorisation is later extended to additional service categories, and whether Bybit's Dubai operations scale materially following the grant, are the points worth tracking next; neither is indicated one way or the other by the available reporting to date.
Sources and findings (1)
- T4Binance — Expanded from VARA Dubai licence to global ADGM licence, effective 5 January 2026, the first exchange to receive one.retrieved M3non-binding