UAE Innovation City, the UAE’s AI-powered free zone located in Ras Al Khaimah, has launched what it calls the first blockchain-enabled digital business identity system. Each registered company within the free zone will receive a sovereign cryptographically verified identity built on the IOPn blockchain, OPN Chain.
Innovation City and IOPn are moving companies into the 21st century by making them living entities on blockchain rather than paper, PDFs, or databases.
The benefits include reduced reliance on centralized intermediaries and increased certainty of verification, in line with the UAE’s national strategy of digitalization using blockchain, AI, and other technologies.
This comes as the UAE government has just announced a bold directive to migrate 50% of federal government departments, services and operations to Agentic AI within two years. Enable intelligent agents to autonomously process licenses, permits, compliance checks, taxation, and cross-border interactions at machine speed.
Paul Dawalibi, CEO of Innovation City, said that Innovation City is no longer just registering companies, but giving them a soul on the blockchain.
“For decades, business identities have been locked away in paper, PDFs, and fragile databases – slow, opaque, and built for a world that no longer exists. We are ending that era. Every company in Innovation City now has a living, verifiable digital identity that transcends borders and platforms, moving straight into the era of intelligent agents.”
The benefits of a blockchain-powered registration process provide transparency and audibility that ensures ownership changes, compliance updates, and verifications are permanently recorded and publicly auditable. Banking regulators, investors, and AI agents can verify the authenticity of registrations in seconds, ensuring reduced document fraud.
Mojtaba Asadian, CEO of IOPn, added: “IOPn is the sovereign infrastructure layer that enables the UAE’s agent-based AI economy, starting with business identities and built to scale across jurisdictions, institutions and sectors. It is cryptographically secure.”
He explained that when Innovation City chose OPN Chain, it chose an infrastructure of digital sovereignty that is verifiable and alive on-chain.
The entire blockchain solution is AI-native as it has the precise infrastructure needed for agent AI to operate at government scale.
Additionally, the platform is built on high-performance EVM-compatible Layer 1 (10,000+ TPS, sub-second finality), making it compatible with other systems.
Research already shows that the agent AI market will grow from $5.25 billion to nearly $200 billion between 2024 and 2034. Blockchain becomes a very important element in the system because these AI agents need to be verified in some way and blockchain-based identification can solve problems.
Future AI agents could autonomously pay registration fees for companies in free zones based on smart contracts and many other services.
The collaboration between blockchain and AI is still in its infancy and will develop explosively in the future.
