Kraken wins VARA approval in Dubai, targets institutional clients

Kraken received preliminary approval from Dubai’s Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority on Thursday to offer spot, margin and over-the-counter trading, staking and its Kraken Prime institutional service. The clearance allows Kraken to open regulated operations in Dubai and begin onboarding qualified clients once remaining licensing steps are complete.

The VARA authorization covers trading and custody services for institutional clients. Kraken Prime combines trading, custody and OTC execution through a single account. The company plans to accept UAE dirham funding later in 2026, enabling local institutions and high-net-worth clients to fund accounts directly with Kraken’s Dubai entity.

Major rivals with Dubai permissions include Binance and OKX; Crypto.com is in preparatory licensing stages. VARA lists roughly 49 approved exchanges, brokerages and custodians and has increased compliance requirements for licensees in recent months.

Kraken previously operated in the UAE and held an Abu Dhabi Global Market approval in 2022; the firm withdrew around 2024. The new VARA clearance routes Kraken’s activity through Dubai, which hosts a large number of crypto-focused firms.

How quickly Kraken converts preliminary approval into a full operational license will determine when it can offer full services and compete for regional institutional flows in Dubai.

“Dubai wrote a rulebook for crypto before most jurisdictions even acknowledged the asset class. That clarity is why real liquidity and institutional capital now sit in the UAE,” Arjun Sethi, co-CEO of Payward and Kraken, wrote in the announcement.

Regulators and market participants will watch VARA’s next steps and how Kraken scales its institutional services in Dubai, including the planned dirham on-ramp into Kraken’s global order books.