- Innovation City has announced the launch of the world’s first blockchain-based digital business identity system
- All businesses receive a ‘sovereign, living, cryptographically verifiable identity powered by IOPn’s native layer on blockchain, OPN chain’
- Every ownership change, compliance update, and verification is permanently recorded
Innovation City, the UAE’s AI-powered free zone in Ras Al Khaimah, has announced the launch of the world’s first blockchain-based digital business identity system.
According to its statement, this means that every company registered to Innovation City now receives a ‘sovereign, living, cryptographically verifiable identity powered by IOPn’s native layer on blockchain, OPN chain’.
“Today we don’t just register companies, we give them a soul on the blockchain,” said Paul Dawalibi, CEO of Innovation City. “For decades business identity has been trapped in paper, PDFs, and fragile databases – slow, opaque, and built for a world that no longer exists. We are ending that era. Every enterprise in Innovation City now carries a living, verifiable digital identity that travels with it across borders, platforms, and straight into the age of intelligent agents. Ras Al Khaimah isn’t following the future. We are writing it. One more thing: the companies that claim their place on this chain today will lead the global economy tomorrow. Everyone else will be explaining why they’re still using yesterday’s tools.”
The new identity means a lot for how the future of business will look.
Every ownership change, compliance update, and verification is permanently recorded and publicly auditable; banks, regulators, investors, and AI agents can confirm authenticity in seconds; it significantly reduces the risk of document fraud, beneficial ownership and shell company formation; and it is built on a high-performance, EVM-compatible Layer 1 (10,000+ TPS, sub-second finality).
Mojtaba Asadian, CEO of IOPn, added: “IOPn is the sovereign infrastructure layer enabling the UAE’s agentic AI economy, starting with business identity and built to scale across jurisdictions, institutions, and sectors. Cryptographically secure. Evolving. Interoperable. Compliant. When Innovation City chose OPN Chain to power the world’s first on-chain business identities, they didn’t just pick a technology – they chose the infrastructure of digital sovereignty. Together, we are proving that the future of enterprise is not centralised databases or fragmented systems. It is sovereign, verifiable, and alive on-chain.”
Time will tell how successful the setup is.
