The UAE continues to push boundaries in digital governance. Innovation City, a free zone in Ras Al Khaimah focused on artificial intelligence, has rolled out what it describes as the first blockchain-based digital business identity system. Each registered company in the free zone will receive a sovereign, cryptographically verified identity built on the OPN Chain, an IOPn blockchain.
This moves businesses away from traditional paper documents, PDFs, or even standard databases. Instead, each enterprise becomes a live, immutable, and soul-bound digital asset on the blockchain. The goal is to reduce reliance on centralized intermediaries while increasing certainty in verifications. This aligns with the UAE’s national strategy to digitize using blockchain, AI, and related technologies.
Agentic AI push drives adoption
The launch comes right after the UAE government announced a directive to transition 50% of federal government sectors, services, and operations to agentic AI within two years. For intelligent agents to handle tasks like licenses, permits, compliance checks, taxation, and cross-border interactions autonomously, they need a reliable way to verify identities. This blockchain system aims to provide that foundation.
Paul Dawalibi, CEO of Innovation City, said the free zone is no longer just registering companies but giving them a soul on the blockchain. He noted that for decades, business identity has been trapped in paper, PDFs, and fragile databases, which are slow and opaque. Now, every enterprise in Innovation City carries a living, verifiable digital identity that works across borders and platforms.
Transparency and fraud reduction
The blockchain-powered registration process brings transparency and auditability. Ownership changes, compliance updates, and verifications are permanently recorded and publicly auditable. Banks, regulators, investors, and AI agents can confirm a company’s authenticity in seconds. This should also reduce document fraud.
Mojtaba Asadian, CEO of IOPn, explained that IOPn is the sovereign infrastructure layer enabling the UAE’s agentic AI economy, starting with business identity. He said the system is designed to scale across jurisdictions, institutions, and sectors. When Innovation City chose the OPN Chain, they selected an infrastructure of digital sovereignty that is verifiable and active on-chain.
Technical foundations and future potential
The blockchain solution is AI native, meaning it has the exact infrastructure needed for agentic AI to operate at government scale. It runs on a high-performance, EVM-compatible Layer 1 blockchain capable of over 10,000 transactions per second with sub-second finality. This makes it compatible with other systems.
Research suggests the agentic AI market could grow from about $5.25 billion to nearly $200 billion between 2024 and 2034. Blockchain will likely play a key role in this growth, as AI agents need verified identities to function properly. In the future, AI agents might even autonomously pay registration fees for free zone companies using smart contracts. The cooperation between blockchain and AI is still in its early stages, but the potential seems significant.
