The UAE's Telecommunications and Digital Government Regulatory Authority (TDRA) has upgraded the blockchain infrastructure underlying the UAEPASS Digital Vault to Avalanche.
UAEPASS is the UAE's national digital identity platform, used by citizens, residents, and visitors to authenticate themselves, sign documents, and access government and private-sector services online. According to TDRA, the platform is used by 12.5 million people, connects to more than 15.000 services, and is relied upon by over 350 government and private-sector entities. The Digital Vault, the component of UAEPASS that handles verified documents, allows a user to request, hold, and share credentials with institutions that require them, and is described by TDRA as powered by blockchain to support secure storage and sharing.
TDRA stated that the move to Avalanche is intended to strengthen the scalability and performance needed to support continued growth in digital identity and verifiable documents across the country. The Digital Vault operates on a dedicated Avalanche layer-1 (L1), meaning it runs on infrastructure separate from shared blockspace used by unrelated applications. In addition, TDRA retains oversight of network membership, permissioning, and configuration for the UAEPASS Digital Vault ecosystem under this structure.
A comparable deployment exists in the US, where the California Department of Motor Vehicles has digitised 42 million vehicle titles on a DMV-run Avalanche L1. The source material notes that a title transfer process that previously took around two weeks on that system can now be completed in minutes.
How verification works on the platform
In a system built on verifiable credentials, an institution receiving a document can confirm its authenticity by referring to the original issuer rather than conducting independent checks. Where a government body issues a credential, and a receiving institution can confirm that issuance, verification becomes a lookup rather than a manual review. TDRA's role as an already-trusted national issuer, combined with the fact that ministries and private companies authenticate through the same platform, is presented in the source material as the basis for this model functioning at a national scale.
Context and implications
TDRA's evaluation and selection of Avalanche followed public procurement processes, which the source material describes as involving significant documentation given the platform's live, citizen-facing status. With 12.5 million users and over 350 connected institutions, the Digital Vault is positioned as an operating example of blockchain-based identity infrastructure in government, rather than a pilot or proof of concept. TDRA has framed the objective as enabling verification to occur once at the point of issuance, with downstream institutions relying on that verification rather than repeating it.
