The Financial Services Regulatory Authority cleared Coinbase Onchain SPV Ltd. to issue certificates backed by real Apple shares, with dividends and voting rights routed through to wallet holders.
Coinbase secured a Financial Services Permission from Abu Dhabi's Financial Services Regulatory Authority on 11 August, and the first prospectus already approved under it covers Apple stock.
The vehicle is Coinbase Onchain SPV Ltd., a special-purpose company Coinbase incorporated in the Abu Dhabi Global Market in June. The SPV issues certificates that represent beneficial interests in underlying shares held in trust. Token holders receive dividends and, subject to the terms of each specific offering, voting rights. The tokens can move like any other asset in a Coinbase wallet and can be used as collateral inside decentralised finance protocols the same way a stablecoin or a wrapped bitcoin can.
The first product live under the framework is Apple CB Certificates, issued by the SPV and cleared through an FSRA-reviewed prospectus in early August. Any wallet-holder verified through Coinbase can hold them. Redemption back into actual Apple common stock still runs through a broker; secondary trading between wallets does not.
This is the piece of the tokenised-securities pitch no other jurisdiction has been willing to write down in a rulebook. Brett Tejpaul, Co-CEO of Coinbase Institutional, framed the FSRA approval as the first time a major financial centre has written rules treating tokenised stocks as securities, blockchain-native instruments and DeFi collateral in one framework. That is the specific claim being staked in Abu Dhabi.
Coinbase is now running two Gulf entities on separate mandates. Dubai handles derivatives through its Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority licence. Abu Dhabi will handle tokenised securities. Splitting the two matches the reality that the emirates chose different regulatory paths: Dubai's VARA is a stand-alone crypto regulator, while ADGM is a financial free zone with its own English-common-law courts and a full-service securities supervisor in the FSRA.
The ADGM route has done work Coinbase could not have done in the United States. The SEC earlier this year indefinitely shelved its own tokenised-stocks innovation exemption after traditional exchanges objected to third-party token issuance rules. The Atkins-era SEC has since asked 27 questions about novel ETF structures without proposing any of its own. Nothing about the current US regulatory posture would have allowed a wallet-native Apple certificate to trade against a stablecoin onchain.
The structure also sidesteps the problem that killed the previous generation of tokenised-stock products. FTX offered synthetic Tesla and Apple exposure through a partner brokerage arrangement. Binance did the same and pulled it within four months. Neither of those structures gave token holders a direct claim on the underlying shares. Coinbase's SPV holds real shares in trust, and its certificates carry the economic rights of a real shareholder. That is a legally distinct product from anything the last cycle produced.
What Abu Dhabi gets is jurisdictional relevance in a market that has spent three years being fought over by Singapore, Hong Kong and Switzerland. ADGM has been positioning itself since the FSRA's founding as a hybrid securities-and-digital-assets venue, and this is the first major US exchange to build a securities product on its rails. Coinbase has been public about wanting to move its international listing infrastructure outside the US, and the deepening relationship with Circle has given it a stablecoin backbone to settle those products against.
The strategic question is where the demand comes from. Traditional shareholders can already hold Apple through a brokerage account at a fraction of the friction. What the tokenised structure adds is composability: the ability to move Apple exposure through DeFi lending markets and structured products that combine it with crypto assets. Whether meaningful demand exists for that at institutional size is the piece nobody has proved. Bernstein's tokenisation supercycle thesis assumes it does. No live product has yet tested that assumption at scale.
Coinbase's own numbers give some sense of what is behind the push. The company just reported a $908 million year from its Circle stablecoin arrangement and renewed the same terms in August. Its institutional wing has been buying capacity in the Middle East for over eighteen months. The Apple product is the first output of that build.
Nothing about the launch is a beta test. FSRA-approved prospectuses are enforceable securities offerings under ADGM law. If the certificates trade actively, other issuers will file prospectuses through the same SPV structure and the range of tokenised names will expand. If the volumes disappoint, the framework will still exist and be waiting.
The first onchain stock certificate is live, and the regulator wrote the rules.
