TL;DR:
- The Telecommunications and Digital Government Regulatory Authority (TDRA) moved the UAEPASS vault infrastructure to a dedicated Avalanche L1 subnet.
- The system spans 12.5 million registered users, over 15,000 integrated services, and more than 350 public and private entities.
- The technical architecture grants the government control over permissions, membership, and network configurations without competing for public bandwidth.
The government of the United Arab Emirates has completed the migration of its national digital identity vault onto the Avalanche blockchain. The transition, confirmed this Monday, September 14, by federal regulator TDRA and Ava Labs, upgrades the technical core of UAEPASS.
BREAKING: The UAE is using Avalanche to power its national digital identity infrastructure, serving 12M+ people
UAE PASS is the country’s national digital identification system- it gives citizens, residents, and visitors a secure way to verify their identity, sign documents and… pic.twitter.com/J0w3QWc9Wg
— Avalanche🔺 (@avax) September 14, 2026
UAEPASS transition toward a dedicated network
The UAEPASS platform serves as the country’s central citizen authentication hub for completing official procedures, signing legal documents, and accessing banking platforms. Its primary component, known as the Digital Vault, stores verified credentials and certificates that users present to third parties.
According to the official report from TDRA, the tool registered 12.5 million active users at the close of operations leading up to the migration. Information from Ava Labs indicates that the primary objective is to turn document verification into an automated direct query, replacing the manual audits each entity previously performed in isolation.
The deployment operates on a sovereign Layer 1 (L1) within the Avalanche ecosystem. This technical design ensures that institutional transactions do not compete for compute resources with external decentralized applications or suffer congestion stemming from general public network traffic.
Saeed Belhoul, Director of Digital Government Operations at TDRA, stated that the platform required a scalable environment to handle the growing demand for credentials. According to the agency’s announcement, the regulatory authority retains full governance over consensus rules, authorized validators, and network privacy parameters.
John Nahas, Chief Business Officer at Ava Labs, stated that national-level identity systems demand deterministic execution models and low latency. Data from the technical firm indicates that dedicated blockspace optimizes response speeds during sudden spikes in authentication requests.
Institutional adoption and public sector background
The integration of civil registries into distributed networks has prior precedents in North America. The California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) migrated 42 million vehicle titles onto its own dedicated L1 within this same technical architecture.
Statistics published by the U.S. agency showed that title transfers went from taking roughly two weeks to settling in a matter of minutes following digitization. Ava Labs maintains that civil property frameworks and identity vaults share continuous availability requirements that drive the adoption of interconnected private environments.
The technology procurement process in the United Arab Emirates was carried out through a federal public tender, compliant with the data sovereignty standards established by the Gulf nation’s digital laws. With more than 350 institutions relying on the credential pipeline, the deployment is in an active operational phase, bypassing preliminary stages or closed proofs of concept.
The production rollout will proceed along its technical roadmap with the gradual onboarding of additional ministries and commercial agencies throughout the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2026.
