UAE free zone issues blockchain business IDs for agentic AI

Innovation City, the AI-focused free zone in Ras Al Khaimah, has launched a blockchain-based digital business identity system that issues cryptographically verified, sovereign identities to companies registered in the free zone.

The identities are recorded on IOPn’s OPN Chain, a high-performance, EVM-compatible Layer 1 blockchain. Innovation City and IOPn describe the credentials as immutable, soul-bound digital assets intended to replace paper records, PDFs and centralized databases. Each company will receive a verifiable on-chain identity that can be checked by banks, regulators, investors and automated systems.

OPN Chain is said to support more than 10,000 transactions per second and sub-second finality, specifications partners say are designed to handle automated agents at government scale. The platform’s EVM compatibility allows it to connect with other blockchain systems.

The launch follows a UAE directive to move 50% of federal sectors, services and operations to agentic AI within two years. Agentic AI refers to autonomous software agents that can handle licensing, permits, compliance checks, taxation and cross-border tasks with limited human intervention.

Paul Dawalibi, Innovation City’s chief executive, described the registration model as ending slow, opaque paper-based identity systems and giving companies “a living, verifiable digital identity that travels with it across borders, platforms, and straight into the age of intelligent agents.”

Mojtaba Asadian, chief executive of IOPn, called OPN Chain a “sovereign infrastructure layer” and described it as “cryptographically secure” and built to scale across jurisdictions, institutions and sectors.

Innovation City and IOPn say the on-chain records will make ownership changes, compliance updates and verifications permanent and auditable, reducing reliance on centralized intermediaries and enabling instant cryptographic checks that can limit document fraud.

The system currently applies to companies registered in Innovation City’s free zone. The partners cited industry forecasts projecting the agentic AI market expanding from about $5.25 billion to nearly $200 billion between 2024 and 2034, and pointed to use cases such as AI agents that could autonomously pay registration fees or manage compliance through smart contracts.

Officials said the platform is intended to scale across jurisdictions and connect with other systems, and that it supports machine-to-machine interactions as automated agents are adopted.