The Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority regulates virtual asset activity in the Emirate of Dubai, outside the DIFC. It is a fourth regime alongside the DFSA in the DIFC, the FSRA in ADGM and the onshore CMA, and it is the one that applies when a platform offers crypto to Dubai residents. The practical question it answers is narrow and often got wrong: a firm's forex or securities licence tells you nothing about whether it may offer you crypto.
What VARA is
VARA is Dubai's virtual assets regulator. It licenses and supervises virtual asset activity in the Emirate of Dubai outside the DIFC, and it publishes its own register, its own consumer and marketplace alerts, and its own enforcement actions.
It sits outside the securities regulators entirely. A VARA licence is not a DFSA, FSRA or CMA licence, and none of those three covers virtual asset activity in Dubai. The four are parallel regimes, not a hierarchy.
The trap: a broker licence does not cover crypto
This is the part worth reading twice, because it is where the confusion costs money. A broker can be genuinely, verifiably licensed by the CMA, the DFSA or the FSRA, and that licence still says nothing about whether it may offer virtual assets to you in Dubai.
Two different things get conflated. Many brokers offer crypto as a contract for difference, which is a derivative on the price and sits under their existing securities or derivatives permission rather than under VARA. Others offer the actual coin, which is virtual asset activity. The first is a broker product; the second is what VARA regulates. If you cannot tell which one you are being offered, that is the question to settle before depositing, because it changes both what you own and who supervises it.
The perimeter is geographic too. The DFSA runs its own regime for crypto tokens and investment tokens inside the DIFC, so a crypto firm in Dubai may answer to the DFSA or to VARA depending on where and how it operates. Same city, two regulators, and the firm's address decides which.
One thing the register itself shows is that VARA and the onshore CMA are not entirely separate in practice: a VARA entry carries a CMA registration number alongside the VASP licence, as the OKX entry below does. We have not verified what obligations that second registration creates, so we note it rather than explain it, but it is a reason not to read the four regulators as four sealed boxes.
How to check a crypto platform
Check it with VARA directly, on VARA's own site, rather than on the platform's website or on a comparison page. The same rules apply as with any register: match the exact legal entity rather than the brand, confirm the status is active, and read what the licence actually permits.
- Confirm whether you are being offered the actual asset or a CFD on its price. Only the first is virtual asset activity.
- Match the legal entity to VARA's register, and check the permitted activities rather than the existence of a licence.
- If the firm is inside the DIFC, check the DFSA instead. The address decides the regulator.
- Read VARA's alerts for the platform's name before depositing.
VARA also publishes consumer and marketplace alerts about unlicensed firms operating in or from Dubai, and those are worth reading before you deposit rather than after. We collect regulator notices across all four UAE authorities on our broker warning list, but for a crypto platform VARA's own notices are the primary source.
VARA does enforce, and there is still no compensation scheme
VARA issues consumer and marketplace alerts about unlicensed virtual-asset firms, and has taken enforcement action against licensed firms too, including well-known exchanges. As with the FSRA, a regulator that acts is worth more than one that does not, and its notices are public.
What a VARA licence does not create is a compensation scheme. No UAE regulator operates one, and virtual assets carry the additional problem that custody arrangements vary enormously between platforms. Licensing is supervision and conduct rules. It is not insurance, and on crypto specifically it is not a guarantee that the platform holds what it says it holds.
What we have not verified
We would rather mark the boundary than write past it. If you need a specific platform's status, VARA's register answers that and this page does not.
The standard behind that boundary is not specific to crypto. How we check a licence, which sources we treat as primary, and when we publish a capture rather than a description are set out in our methodology.
