UAEPASS Digital Vault Upgrade Puts Avalanche Behind Identity for 12.5 Million UAE Users

UAE’s national identity system picks Avalanche for its Digital Vault upgrade

Avalanche has secured a central role in the blockchain upgrade of the UAEPASS Digital Vault, the document service inside the United Arab Emirates’ national identity platform that is used by 12.5 million people. The deal, announced on Sep. 14 by Deca4 and Ava Labs, hands one of the largest government digital identity systems in the Middle East a new cryptographic backbone built on Avalanche infrastructure.

The agreement adds a government use case of unusual scale to the Avalanche ecosystem. UAEPASS is not a pilot program or a sandbox experiment — it is the daily identity layer for citizens, residents, and visitors across the UAE, connecting them to more than 15,000 services from over 350 public and private entities. The Digital Vault sits inside that platform, letting users request, store, and share verified documents through the same national system.

How the verification system works

The design keeps personal data off the blockchain. Rather than storing the contents of documents onchain, the Digital Vault uses cryptographic records to confirm their integrity. A blockchain record can verify that a document has not been altered without placing the personal information contained in the file on a public ledger.

That separation matters for both privacy and practicality. Users can share a verified file while the supporting cryptographic record lets the receiving organization check whether the document remains authentic. After the upgrade, Avalanche becomes the underlying infrastructure for that verification process, with Deca4 and Ava Labs saying the new system will improve capacity and performance as demand for digital identity services and verified documents grows across the country.

Responsibilities are split three ways. The UAE’s Telecommunications and Digital Government Regulatory Authority (TDRA) will supervise the Digital Vault ecosystem and its place within the national digital government framework. Deca4, which works across blockchain and digital infrastructure, will lead the local implementation and manage the transition. Ava Labs will supply the Avalanche infrastructure along with technical support throughout the deployment.

Quotes from the partners

Saeed Belhoul, Dgov operations director, said the system already plays a regular role in daily life for millions of people in the UAE, and that the trust placed in it is something the team protects every day. He added that upgrading the vault would give the platform infrastructure capable of carrying that responsibility for years to come.

Mohammed Mahfoudh, founder and CEO of Deca4, framed the partnership as a combination of local implementation experience and battle-tested blockchain technology. “By combining Deca4’s local implementation capabilities with Avalanche technology, we are helping build a scalable foundation for the next generation of trusted digital documents and government services,” Mahfoudh said.

John Nahas, chief business officer at Ava Labs, argued that digital identity is one of the clearest examples of technology that has to work reliably at real-world scale. He described the blockchain as infrastructure that works behind the service, noting that the project shows how Avalanche can support systems people rely on in their everyday lives without ever interacting with a wallet or a token.

A different kind of win for Avalanche

The UAEPASS deployment is notable for what it is not: there is no native AVAX token component presented as part of the service. The infrastructure role focuses purely on document verification integrity, not retail crypto payments or tokenized products. That stands apart from Avalanche’s consumer-facing pushes, such as the Visa card program announced in February 2025 that let users spend supported cryptocurrencies wherever Visa is accepted.

For US-based Ava Labs, the agreement extends the footprint of its technology in public digital infrastructure outside the United States. Landing a national-scale identity and document verification system gives the company a reference deployment that few public blockchains can match — Ethereum leads in tokenized assets, Solana in consumer payments and trading, but government identity rails remain a comparatively open field.

Previous Avalanche enterprise activity in the region and beyond — from tokenized securities platforms in South Korea to warehouse receipt pilots in India — has generally targeted financial infrastructure. The UAEPASS deal reaches further, touching the identity layer itself. If the upgrade performs at the scale the partners expect, it could become a template for other governments weighing blockchain-backed verification for official documents.

The stakes are real. A vault serving 12.5 million users and more than 350 entities cannot tolerate downtime or verification failures, and the partners are explicitly positioning the upgrade around capacity and performance headroom. TDRA will continue to supervise the ecosystem as the rollout proceeds, with Deca4 overseeing the transition and Ava Labs providing ongoing technical support for the national deployment.

Market context

The announcement landed with AVAX trading around 7.56 USD, roughly flat over the past 24 hours, while the broader market held its breath ahead of the US Federal Reserve’s rate decision expected this week. Bitcoin traded near 78,000 USD at press time, with Ethereum around 2,514 USD and Solana near 102 USD, according to CoinGecko data.

Infrastructure news of this kind rarely moves token prices immediately, since government deployments do not translate into direct token demand. But the reputational value is harder to price. As governments in the Gulf, Asia, and Europe weigh blockchain upgrades for identity, licensing, and document systems, the UAE project gives Avalanche a live national-scale case study — and gives competing ecosystems one less uncontested vertical to claim.