Tokenized securities infrastructure just got two new regional anchors. Coinbase secured a regulatory permission in Abu Dhabi to run a full tokenization hub, while Brazil’s largest bank joined a pilot to tokenize bonds and funds. Neither event is really about one company. Together they mark the point where tokenized asset infrastructure stops being a US and European experiment and starts building out region by region, under real regulatory license rather than sandbox promises.
Two licenses, one direction
On August 11, 2026, Coinbase said it had received a Financial Services Permission from the Financial Services Regulatory Authority (FSRA), the regulator inside the Abu Dhabi Global Market (ADGM). The permission covers two activities at once: arranging deals in investments and providing custody, which lets Coinbase both intermediate trades in tokenized securities and hold the underlying assets under a single license. Brett Tejpaul, co-CEO of Coinbase Institutional, framed the move as a jurisdictional gap being filled, saying no major financial center had yet built a framework that treats tokenized equities simultaneously as securities, blockchain native tokens and DeFi composable assets. ADGM’s chief market development officer, Arvind Ramamurthy, called the approval a marker of the emirate’s ambitions in global finance.
The initial use case is narrow but telling: an ADGM special purpose vehicle, Coinbase Onchain SPV Ltd., has issued Apple CB Certificates, tokens representing beneficial interests in Apple’s common stock. Holders get shareholder rights, including dividends and voting, without needing a brokerage account, and every transfer runs through ongoing sanctions screening with the ability to freeze or seize assets at the wallet level for compliance. That detail matters: this is a tokenization structure built to satisfy a securities regulator, not to route around one.
Brazil takes the institutional route
The same week, Itau Unibanco, Latin America’s largest bank by assets, said it would work with digital asset infrastructure provider OpenAssets on a structured use case inside a tokenization pilot run by ANBIMA, Brazil’s capital markets association. More than 50 financial organizations are already part of the ANBIMA pilot, which is testing how debentures, Brazil’s standard form of corporate debt, and investment fund units can be issued, traded and settled on a private, permissioned ledger. OpenAssets chairman and chief executive Gabor Gurbacs called Brazil one of the most forward looking markets in finance, a market moving tokenization from exploration to production.
Itau’s involvement builds on the country’s broader Drex program, the central bank’s wholesale digital currency initiative that has spent several years testing blockchain based settlement rails. Where Coinbase’s ADGM permission is an off the shelf infrastructure license, ANBIMA’s pilot is closer to a regulatory sandbox: participants test standards before rules are finalized, with the explicit goal of keeping any resulting system compatible with Brazil’s existing capital market structure.
The pattern: regulators are writing the rulebook first
Both moves follow the same sequence, and it is a different sequence than crypto’s first decade. A regulator (FSRA in Abu Dhabi, ANBIMA alongside Brazil’s central bank apparatus) defines the permission or pilot structure, and only then does the tokenized product get built inside it. That is a shift from the earlier pattern, where issuers launched tokenized products first and regulators reacted afterward, as with many stablecoin and tokenized deposit launches over the past two years. It also explains why the initial products are narrow: one certificate tracking Apple stock, one pilot restricted to debentures and funds. Regulators are not approving tokenization as a category; they are approving specific instruments, wrapped in specific compliance controls, one at a time.
The two jurisdictions are also making different bets on where volume comes from. ADGM is positioning to capture international capital that wants exposure to US equities through a blockchain native wrapper, without routing through a US brokerage. ANBIMA and Itau are focused inward, on modernizing settlement for instruments Brazilian institutions already trade at scale. Read together, they suggest tokenized market infrastructure will not converge on a single global standard soon. It will grow as a patchwork of jurisdiction specific licenses, each shaped by what that regulator is comfortable approving first.
What it means for the finance leader
For banks, asset managers and payments infrastructure providers watching tokenization from the sidelines, the operative signal is not that tokenization is happening, which has been true for years. It is that the entry point has moved from technology partnerships to regulatory permissions. A finance leader evaluating tokenized asset exposure now needs to ask which license a counterparty actually holds, in which jurisdiction, and what activities it covers, the same diligence applied to any other regulated financial infrastructure provider. Firms that treat an ADGM Financial Services Permission or an ANBIMA pilot slot as a marketing claim will miss the real differentiator: which providers can operate at institutional scale without waiting for the next enforcement action to catch up with them.
It also changes vendor selection. A provider building only technology, without a comparable regulatory foothold, carries the same jurisdictional risk that has slowed tokenized deposit and stablecoin rollouts elsewhere. Partior and OpenAssets’ earlier work on atomic stablecoin settlement and Lloyds and CaixaBank’s live cross border tokenized deposit settlement both followed the same arc: a regulatory or central bank sponsored pilot first, commercial volume second. Abu Dhabi and Brazil are the newest data points in that progression, not a new one.
What to watch next
Two things will confirm whether this becomes a durable pattern rather than a pair of one off approvals: whether ADGM extends the FSRA permission to additional tokenized equity issuers beyond Coinbase’s initial Apple certificate, and whether ANBIMA’s pilot graduates any of its 50 plus participants to production volume with a public rulebook, rather than staying a closed sandbox indefinitely. Either milestone would mark the transition from regulators tolerating tokenization to regulators actively building for it, the transition that determines whether tokenized securities infrastructure becomes core banking plumbing or stays a niche product line.
Source: PR Newswire
