UAE Innovation City, the UAE’s AI-powered free zone in Ras Al Khaimah, has launched what it calls the first blockchain enabled digital business identity system, where each registered business in the freezone will receive a sovereign cryptographically verified identity built on IOPn blockchain, the OPN Chain.
Innovation City, and IOPn are moving companies towards the 21st century by making them live entities on a blockchain and not on paper, PDF, or database, but rather on an immutable, soul bound digital asset.
The benefit is less reliance on centralized intermediaries and more certainty in verifications, aligned with UAE’s national strategy of digitization using blockchain, AI, and other technologies
This comes as the UAE government has just announced its bold directive to transition 50% of federal government sectors, services, and operations to Agentic AI within two years. For those intelligent agents to autonomously process licenses, permits, compliance checks, taxation, and cross-border interactions at machine speed.
Paul Dawalibi, CEO of Innovation City, noted that Innovation City is no longer just registering companies but giving them a soul on the blockchain.
He adds, “For decades business identity has been trapped in paper, PDFs, and fragile databases – slow, opaque, and built for a world that no longer exists. We are ending that era. Every enterprise in Innovation City now carries a living, verifiable digital identity that travels with it across borders, platforms, and straight into the age of intelligent agents.”
The benefits of the blockchain powered registration process will bring transparency and audibility ensuring that ownership changes, compliance updates and verifications are permanently recorded and publicly auditable. Banks regulators, investors, and AI agents can confirm the authenticity of registration in seconds, and also ensure a reduction in document fraud.
Mojtaba Asadian, CEO of IOPn, added: “IOPn is the sovereign infrastructure layer enabling the UAE’s agentic AI economy, starting with business identity and built to scale across jurisdictions, institutions, and sectors. Cryptographically secure.”
He explains that when Innovation City chose OPN Chain, they chose an infrastructure of digital sovereignty that is verifiable and alive on-chain.
The entire blockchain solution is AI native as it has the exact infrastructure required for agentic AI to operate at government scale.
Furthermore, given that the platform is built on a high-performance, EVM-compatible Layer 1 (10,000+ TPS, sub-second finality), it is compatible with other systems.
Already, research has indicated that the agentic AI market will grow from $5.25 billion to nearly $200 billion between 2024 and 2034. Blockchain will be a very important element in the system as these AI agents will need to be verified somehow, and with blockchain based identification, issues can be resolved.
AI agents in the future may autonomously pay registration fees of companies in free zones based on smart contracts as well as many other services.
The cooperation of Blockchain and AI has just started, and the future will be explosive.
