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 every registered company in the Free Zone will receive a sovereign, cryptographically verified identity built on IOPn blockchain, the OPN Chain.
Innovation City and IOPn bring companies into the 21st century by making them living entities on a blockchain and not on paper, PDF or database, but rather on an immutable, soul-bound digital asset.
The benefit is less dependence on centralized intermediaries and greater certainty in verifications, in line with the UAE’s national strategy for digitalization 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 activities to Agentic AI within two years. For those intelligent agents to autonomously process licenses, permits, compliance checks, taxes and cross-border interactions at machine speed.
Paul Dawalibi, CEO of Innovation City, noted that Innovation City no longer just registers companies, but gives them a soul on the blockchain.
He adds: “Corporate identity has been trapped in paper, PDFs and fragile databases for decades – slow, opaque and built for a world that no longer exists. We are ending that era. Every enterprise in Innovation City now has a living, verifiable digital identity that travels with it across borders and platforms, and straight into the age of intelligent agents.”
The benefits of the blockchain-powered registration process provide transparency and audibility, ensuring that ownership changes, compliance updates and verifications are permanently recorded and publicly auditable. Bank supervisors, 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 that powers the UAE’s agentic AI economy, starting with corporate identity and built to scale across jurisdictions, institutions and sectors. Cryptographically secure.”
He explains that when Innovation City chose OPN Chain, they opted for an infrastructure of digital sovereignty that is verifiable and alive in the chain.
The entire blockchain solution is AI-native, as it has the exact infrastructure needed to run agent AI at government scale.
Additionally, because the platform is built on a powerful, EVM-compatible Layer 1 (10,000+ TPS, sub-second finality), it is compatible with other systems.
Research has already shown that the AI market will grow from $5.25 billion to almost $200 billion between 2024 and 2034. Blockchain will be a very important element in the system because these AI agents need to be authenticated somehow, and blockchain-based identification can solve problems.
In the future, AI agents will be able to autonomously pay the registration fees of companies in free zones based on smart contracts and many other services.
The collaboration between Blockchain and AI has only just begun and the future will be explosive.