Payward, the parent company of crypto exchange Kraken, has secured authorization from Dubai’s Virtual Asset Regulatory Authority (VARA) — a broker-dealer, investment and management licence approval that opens the door to full regional operations.
The authorization gives Kraken the regulatory green light to offer a complete service range in Dubai: spot, margin, and OTC trading, staking, and institutional access through Kraken Prime, plus user-to-user crypto transfers via its Krak product. UAE traders gain access to Kraken’s global orderbooks and their liquidity across European, US, and APAC markets.
Crucially for local adoption, a locally regulated Payward subsidiary will let clients fund and withdraw in dirhams (AED) — removing the friction of routing through foreign currencies that still hampers several internationally licensed rivals.
The Dubai approval is Kraken’s second regulatory beachhead in the Emirates: it secured authorization in Abu Dhabi under the ADGM framework in 2022, among the first global exchanges licensed for regulated virtual asset trading in the region.
The move underscores how decisively the UAE has positioned itself as the regulated crypto hub between Europe and Asia. VARA’s licensing regime — demanding but predictable — has now drawn Binance, Bybit, OKX, Coinbase, and Kraken into building on-the-ground, supervised operations in Dubai rather than serving the market offshore.
For Payward, the UAE expansion is part of a deliberate strategy of establishing regulated operations in key financial centers — a contrast with the offshore-first growth of crypto’s earlier era, and a sign of where institutional crypto money expects to be custodied next.
