The UAE’s national digital identity platform is moving the blockchain layer underneath its document vault onto Avalanche, the network said in a blog post published on September 14. The upgrade covers UAEPASS, the government identity system that citizens, residents, and visitors use to authenticate themselves, sign documents, and reach government and private-sector services online, a system the network says serves 12.5 million people. It marks one of the largest government-backed deployments of a blockchain-based identity layer announced to date.
A National Identity System at Scale
UAEPASS is operated under the Telecommunications and Digital Government Regulatory Authority (TDRA), the UAE’s federal digital government authority. Users can access more than 15,000 services through the platform, and more than 350 government and private-sector entities rely on it. Inside the platform sits the Digital Vault, the component that handles verified documents, letting a person request a credential, hold it, and share it with an institution that needs to confirm it is genuine. For the individual that means assembling the same proof less often; for institutions it means less duplicated verification work on documents they cannot independently confirm.
Why the Vault Is Moving to Avalanche
According to Avalanche, TDRA is upgrading the blockchain layer underneath the Digital Vault to strengthen the scalability and performance needed to support continued growth in digital identity and verifiable documents across the country. The network framed the shift as a route to trust at national scale, arguing that a shared record no single participant can quietly revise lets an institution confirm a ministry-issued credential through a lookup rather than running its own verification. The migration adds to a run of institutional interest in the network, including Charles Schwab’s plan to add Avalanche spot trading.
Blockchain Identity Momentum
The announcement follows a pattern of regulated institutions turning to Avalanche for tokenized and identity workloads, after earlier work such as institutional secondary trades that set a blueprint for tokenized private credit on the network. Avalanche described the UAE migration as evidence that national-scale digital identity can run on a verifiable shared record rather than paper. The upgrade has not been separately confirmed by the UAE regulator in a public statement, making it a developing story that could reshape how government credentials are issued and shared.