Robinhood Markets has received authorization from the Dubai Financial Services Authority (DFSA) to offer retail trading and custody across 10 asset classes, including bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, equities, ETFs and investment tokens, the company said in a statement on Wednesday.
The platform is set to go live in the region in 2027 from a new hub in the Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC), a special economic zone that will serve as the firm’s Middle East and North Africa headquarters.
Salah Kaddoura has been named senior executive officer and president of Robinhood MENA. The title is a DFSA-recognized role, which makes him the person regulators will call. He will build out the Dubai team ahead of launch.
“The DIFC is one of the world’s most important financial hubs, and our expansion there brings us closer to building a global platform that enables anyone, anywhere to own the highest quality financial assets,” said Vlad Tenev, Robinhood’s chairman and CEO, in the company statement.
Robinhood’s expansion over the years
Dubai extends a run of expansion beyond the US, where the app made its name with young investors trading single stocks.
Robinhood entered the UK in 2024, opened full operations in the European Union last year, won in-principle approval for brokerage services in Singapore in April, and closed its purchase of Canadian crypto platform WonderFi in June.
At home, it added weekend trading and perpetual futures in September. The company says it counts more than one million customers outside the US.
Johann Kerbrat, who runs crypto and international for Robinhood, framed the Dubai move around a wave of new retail investors in the region. He is the same executive who disclosed on October 7 that Robinhood had put $25 million of bitcoin on its own balance sheet, the first time the firm held BTC as a corporate asset rather than on behalf of customers.
The DFSA has signed off on Robinhood holding client digital assets, not routing trades alone. For a firm that took years to enable bitcoin withdrawals in the United States, being cleared for custody from day one in a new jurisdiction says something about how far its crypto operation has matured.
Robinhood arrives in a financial center that keeps growing despite the war with Iran and tension across the region. The DIFC passed 10,000 active registered firms this year and continues to draw global names, Ken Griffin’s Citadel among them.
In March, it opened a cluster of new towers with 600,000 square feet of commercial space, with Deutsche Bank and Moody’s among the tenants, according to Bloomberg. Proprietary trading firm Maven said this week it will close its New York office as it shifts weight to Dubai.
Competition will not be thin. The DIFC listed 72 authorized brokerages as of March 31, and several crypto-native exchanges hold licenses from Dubai’s separate Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority.
Robinhood has not said which countries will be served at launch, what pricing will look like, or how “eligible investors” will be defined, and that last point will decide the size of the addressable market.
