UAE Telecommunications and Digital Government Regulatory Authority puts the UAEPASS platform, serving 12.5 million users, on a dedicated Avalanche L1, connecting more than 15,000 services from 350 agencies.

The UAE Telecommunications and Digital Government Regulatory Authority (TDRA) is migrating the blockchain infrastructure supporting the national digital identity platform UAEPASS to Avalanche, according to statements from the blockchain company and the UAE’s federal telecommunications regulator.

UAEPASS is currently a tool for residents, citizens, and visitors to log in, sign documents, and use online services. The number vault is a feature that allows storage of verified documents and provides credentials to organizations during the verification process.

According to Avalanche’s figures, the platform currently serves about 12.5 million users, providing access to more than 15,000 services, and is used by more than 350 government agencies and private-sector organizations. Moving the system to a trusted blockchain makes verification a standard lookup operation, instead of each organization having to carry out its own separate verification process from scratch.

Saeed Belhoul, Director of Digital Government Operations, said that the UAEPASS number vault has become an important part of life for UAE residents, and that this upgrade is intended to move the number vault to infrastructure capable of meeting growing demand while also protecting the trust residents have placed in the system over the years.

A specialized Layer 1 architecture ensures stable performance

The number vault in UAEPASS will run on an Avalanche Layer 1 blockchain—i.e., a dedicated network operated and controlled by the organization itself—rather than sharing processing capacity with unrelated activities on a general-purpose network. According to Avalanche, this structure ensures that traffic from other activities does not compete for processing resources with UAEPASS, while also granting TDRA control over network membership status, system access, and configuration.

John Nahas, Business Director at Ava Labs, describes digital identity as one of the clearest examples of technology that must operate reliably at real-world scale—like a high-performance infrastructure layer running in the background to maintain the safety and seamlessness of digital services.

The UAE is not the first government to choose to integrate Avalanche in this model. Previously, the California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) moved 42 million vehicle title records onto an Avalanche L1 blockchain operated by the DMV itself, helping reduce the time to transfer vehicle ownership from about two weeks to just a few minutes.

Avalanche believes these two projects share many similarities in the scale of services for tens of millions of users, even though one system processes identity data while the other processes asset ownership records. It also notes that public record systems, in general, tend to be suited to specialized blockchain architectures like this.