The Abu Dhabi Securities Exchange Group has entered a strategic agreement with DFNS to provide digital asset wallet and tokenization capability for onchain assets. ADX is a market infrastructure group that brings together an exchange, a central securities depository, and a clearing house. It’s the machinery through which the United Arab Emirates’ capital markets trade, clear, settle, and custody. So when infrastructure of that kind embeds tokenization into its core, the layers underneath have to meet the standard of the market itself. ADX chose DFNS to be that layer.
ADX, the market infrastructure of Abu Dhabi’s capital markets
The Abu Dhabi Securities Exchange was established in November 2000 under Abu Dhabi law, with independent financial and administrative status and the supervisory powers of a national exchange, and converted into a Public Joint Stock Company in March 2020. Today it is the second-largest exchange in the Arab region by market capitalization and one of the fastest-growing exchange groups in the Middle East, providing a regulated marketplace for equities, government and corporate bonds, exchange-traded funds, and other instruments approved by the UAE Securities and Commodities Authority.
What makes ADX distinctive is its structure. The ADX Group comprises the exchange and its post-trade ecosystem, including its wholly owned subsidiaries AD Depository and AD Clear, an integrated, globally aligned architecture spanning trading, clearing, settlement, and custody. Its strategy is explicitly aligned with the UAE’s national development agenda, “Towards the Next 50,” which aims to build a sustainable, diversified, high-value-added economy, and its digital assets strategy is already in motion. ADX has listed digitally native bonds and is developing tokenized equities. This agreement positions ADX among the first regional financial market infrastructures to develop integrated digital asset wallet and tokenization capabilities, and reinforces its commitment to building the infrastructure required for the issuance, listing, and trading of digital assets in the UAE and beyond.
“Tokenization is becoming an increasingly significant force in the evolution of global capital markets. It influences how capital is raised, invested and transferred,” said Abdulla Al Nuaimi, Group Chief Executive Officer of the ADX Group. “By integrating secure digital-asset wallet and tokenization technology into our ecosystem, ADX aims to establish a robust foundation for a broader range of on-chain products and services. This advances our strategy to position Abu Dhabi as a globally connected hub for the next generation of capital markets, where innovation is underpinned by robust governance, operational resilience and investor confidence.”
What the collaboration builds
Under the agreement, ADX will leverage the DFNS platform to provide wallet and tokenization capability for onchain assets across its ecosystem. For a market infrastructure, that capability has a precise shape, and it maps directly onto what DFNS was built for.
- Issuance and servicing of tokenized instruments. Digital bonds and tokenized equities are issued, listed, traded, settled, and serviced through corporate actions. The DFNS Tokenization Engine support lets ADX operate any issuance or registry contract, including the permissioned token standards designed for regulated securities, and service instruments end to end.
- Wallets for a market. Issuers, members, custodians, and investors on a tokenized venue each need a secure onchain account, provisioned programmatically and at scale. DFNS provides those accounts with transaction management on every network the venue’s assets live on.
- Controls at market-infrastructure standard. Approval quorums, limits, allowlists, roles, and screening are enforced by the Policy and Governance Engines before anything is signed, so the rules a regulated exchange must uphold are enforced cryptographically. Every action lands in a complete, exportable audit trail to provide the evidence base an auditor or a regulator expects.
- Sovereignty over deployment. DFNS runs as SaaS, hybrid, or fully on-premises, with MPC, TEE, HSM or offline key infrastructure and jurisdictional control over key material. For a national market infrastructure, the ability to decide where keys live and where the platform runs is a requisite.
“ADX is taking a significant step in advancing the infrastructure required for tokenized capital markets, and we are proud to support that journey,” said Clarisse Hagège, CEO of DFNS. “As financial institutions increasingly explore digital assets and on-chain financial products, secure wallet infrastructure becomes a critical component of market integrity and investor confidence. Through this collaboration, DFNS and ADX are laying the technological foundations for a new generation of regulated digital asset services. We believe Abu Dhabi is uniquely positioned to lead innovation in this space, and we look forward to supporting ADX’s vision of building a trusted, globally competitive digital-assets ecosystem.”
Why Abu Dhabi, and why now
Abu Dhabi has built one of the world’s most deliberate regulatory environments for digital assets, and DFNS has been operating in it for years, from our Dubai office and through clients who have secured licenses from the region’s regulators. What distinguishes the UAE is the seriousness, the supervisory frameworks that ask hard questions about third-party risk, the cybersecurity, the operational resilience, and the institutions willing to build them. An exchange group taking tokenization into its own market infrastructure is the logical next step of that seriousness, and it’s the kind of work DFNS was built for.
From listing to lifecycle
The first wave of tokenized capital markets proved that a bond or a share could exist onchain. The next wave is harder and more valuable: making the entire market run there, issuance, trading, clearing, settlement, custody, and servicing, with the governance and resilience investors take for granted today. That is the work ADX has begun, and the layer DFNS provides beneath it: accounts, tokenization, transactions, controls, and evidence, on one platform, deployed on ADX’s terms.
Together, ADX and DFNS are laying the foundations for a market where the next generation of capital markets infrastructure is built in Abu Dhabi and connected to the world.
Get started
- Learn more about ADX: adx.ae
- Learn more about onchain core banking: dfns.co
- Explore the platform and documentation: docs.dfns.co
- Talk to our team: sales@dfns.co