Revolut Wins In-Principle VARA Nod for UAE Crypto Services

Revolut has secured in-principle approval from Dubai's Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority to offer virtual asset services in the United Arab Emirates, clearing the way for the fintech to bring crypto trading to a market it has been circling for months. The approval spans broker-dealer, management and investment, and exchange activity. It is not the finish line. Revolut still needs final regulatory sign-off before a single UAE customer can place a trade.

The company plans to run the offering through two front doors: its retail app and Revolut X, its standalone exchange. Eligible UAE customers would be able to buy, sell, and hold digital assets inside the country's regulated framework, once those remaining approvals land.

What Revolut brings to Dubai

The numbers give a sense of what is being pointed at the emirate. Revolut says it serves more than 75 million customers globally, with over 16 million of them holding crypto. Its crypto trading business currently operates in the UK and the European Economic Area, and the UAE is the next stop on that map.

Joseph Khair, who heads Revolut Digital Assets FZE in the UAE, said the country continues to show "global leadership" in building a regulatory framework for virtual assets, and that the approval "lays the foundation" for Revolut to launch its digital asset services in a regulated environment. He framed it as supporting VARA's goal of a "safe, transparent, and innovation-driven" ecosystem.

The second licence this year

This is not Revolut's first UAE authorisation of 2026. Earlier this year the Central Bank of the UAE approved the company for payments activity. Revolut has been explicit about how the two fit together: it wants a locally regulated financial ecosystem in the country, not a crypto sideshow bolted onto a foreign entity. Payments and virtual assets under separate regulators, in the same jurisdiction, is what that looks like on paper.

Dubai has been assembling the plumbing for this. Last year the Securities and Commodities Authority and VARA aligned their licensing frameworks so that a Dubai-issued crypto licence could travel further across the UAE, provided the holder clears compliance requirements. That change turned a Dubai licence into something closer to a national one, which is a large part of why firms keep queueing up for it.

Revolut joins a list that already includes MultiBank and CoinMENA, both of which have picked up VARA authorisations while expanding in the emirate. What separates Revolut is scale: 75 million users is a different order of magnitude from a regional exchange, and its arrival would test whether Dubai's framework was built for a consumer fintech of that size.

The open question is timing. Neither Revolut nor VARA has put a date on the final approvals, and until they do, the UAE launch exists only as a plan with a regulator's provisional blessing attached.