Kraken Clears Dubai's Final Licensing Stage and Plans Dirham Pairs

Payward, the company behind Kraken, now holds the last permission it needs to open in Dubai. Its local entity, Payward FZCO, has Full Market Approval from the Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority, the emirate's dedicated crypto supervisor, covering retail, professional and institutional clients under broker-dealer, investment and management categories. The firm announced it on Monday 12 October through a wire release and said UAE clients go live "in the coming weeks". Dirham-denominated spot and margin pairs arrive at launch, with deposits and withdrawals in the same currency. Derivatives do not.

Two dates for one licence

The announcement date is not in dispute. The grant date is. Crypto Briefing and CoinGape both report that VARA issued the approval on 12 October, the day of the release. FinanceFeeds, filing that afternoon, says the authority's public register shows the licence issued on 6 October and listed as active, and no other outlet mentions the register at all. Blockhead treats 12 October only as the day Payward said so. Six days is a short gap and the accounts still do not reconcile, so the register date rests on one source. What all five agree on is the sequence: a preliminary approval on 21 May 2026 that let the firm finish its operational build without onboarding anyone, then the full grant. Flowdesk crossed the same two stages in roughly two months when its broker-dealer licence came through in August. Payward took closer to five.

What opens and what waits

The product list is identical in all five accounts. Spot and margin trading in dirham pairs, dirham deposits and withdrawals through the local entity, on-chain staking, xStocks tokenized equities and Krak, the company's crypto-transfer app. Institutional clients get OTC spot execution and Kraken Prime, its prime-brokerage service, drawing on order books the firm says it runs in Europe, the US and the Asia-Pacific. An embedded trading product for regional partners comes later. Crypto derivatives and further yield products are set for late 2026 and into 2027, and each needs its own approval first, which Crypto Briefing is careful to say guarantees nothing. Blockhead adds that perpetual futures are absent at launch and that the product drives much of the volume at regional competitors. That reading is its alone.

"From launch, clients in the UAE get the same order book and multi-asset coverage we run in every other market," said Arjun Sethi, co-chief executive of Payward and Kraken.

Three outlets render that remark three different ways. The wording above is Blockhead's.

Who is already there

Counting the field turns out to be harder than it looks. Blockhead lists Binance, OKX, Bybit and Crypto.com as VARA licence holders. CoinGape dates Binance's full Dubai licence to April 2024 and Crypto.com's exchange and broker-dealer permissions to November 2023, then places Bybit's platform-operator licence with the UAE's federal Securities and Commodities Authority in October 2025, which is a different regulator entirely. On Bybit the two accounts contradict each other. The distinction is not cosmetic. VARA supervises virtual-asset business in Dubai outside the Dubai International Financial Centre, which answers to its own authority, and Abu Dhabi Global Market answers to a third. Standard Chartered took the centre's route to much the same institutional client base when it began quoting spot bitcoin and ether there in September.

The part nobody has published

No account carries a UAE user target, a market-size estimate or a volume figure, and Payward published none. The firm says it holds more than 100 licences and registrations worldwide; Blockhead alone adds 6.6 million funded accounts as of 30 June, a number no other page repeats. Two further details sit on single sources and are worth holding lightly. Kraken already held an Abu Dhabi Global Market licence from 2022, which the new release does not mention, and it removed several assets for UAE residents in September, among them privacy coins and some stablecoins. Neither claim is corroborated anywhere else. A licence is permission, not a business. Until the dirham pairs are quoting and somebody publishes a volume, what Payward has in Dubai is the right to compete for one.