Avalanche to Power UAE PASS Digital Vault for 12.5 Million Users, With Helicon Landing September 22

TDRA, the UAE's federal digital government authority, is upgrading the blockchain layer supporting the UAE PASS Digital Vault to Avalanche, the certified document store inside the country's national digital identity platform, which serves 12.5 million citizens, residents and visitors through more than 15,000 services across over 350 public and private entities. The Digital Vault runs on a dedicated Avalanche L1 instead of shared blockspace, so capacity is never contended by unrelated network activity and network membership, permissioning and configuration remain decisions the operator makes. The same architecture already runs in California, where the DMV has digitized 42 million vehicle titles on a DMV-operated Avalanche L1 and cut title transfers from around two weeks to minutes. The deal follows a run of institutional work on Avalanche, including Progmat's migration of digital securities infrastructure covering more than JPY 452 billion in asset value to an Avalanche L1 in May 2026, alongside deployments tied to JPMorgan, Citi, T. Rowe Price and WisdomTree. Helicon activates on mainnet on September 22 at 11:00 AM ET with AvalancheGo v1.15.0, bundling six community proposals that bring continuous execution to the C-Chain, introduce auto-renewed staking, cut the minimum validation period from two weeks to 48 hours, raise the validator uptime requirement from 80% to 90% for new validations, lower the minimum consumption rate from 10% to 7.5%, and make the minimum C-Chain gas price dynamic.

 

 

Avalanche spent the first half of 2026 acquiring the two things that make institutional deployment possible, which are a regulatory label and a set of tools built for permissioned environments. The SEC and CFTC classified AVAX as a digital commodity in a joint final rule on March 17, placing it alongside Bitcoin and Ethereum and closing years of ambiguity over whether it had been sold as a security. VanEck listed the first US spot AVAX ETF in January and Grayscale's staking product followed on Nasdaq in March.

The UAE PASS announcement is what that groundwork is supposed to produce. TDRA is upgrading the blockchain system behind the Digital Vault, the component where users of the country's national identity platform keep and share certified documents, and that vault runs on a dedicated Avalanche L1. A week later, on September 22, the Helicon upgrade activates on mainnet with six Avalanche Community Proposals that change how the C-Chain executes blocks and how validators are paid, almost exactly six years after the network launched.

 

 

 

The Telecommunications and Digital Government Regulatory Authority is upgrading the blockchain infrastructure beneath the UAE PASS Digital Vault to Avalanche, according to a detailed post published on Avalanche's blog on September 14. The stated purpose is strengthening the scalability and performance needed to support continued growth in digital identity and verifiable documents across the country.

Saeed Belhoul, TDRA's Dgov Operations Director, described the Digital Vault as part of daily life for millions of people in the UAE, with the trust placed in it something the authority protects every day, and framed the upgrade as ensuring the platform runs on infrastructure able to carry that responsibility for years. John Nahas, Chief Business Officer at Ava Labs, called digital identity one of the clearest examples of technology that has to work reliably at real-world scale, describing the project as high-performance infrastructure operating behind the scenes to deliver secure and seamless services.

Responsibilities divide three ways. TDRA supervises the service and its place within the UAE's digital government system, Deca4 leads local implementation and coordinates the transition, and Ava Labs supplies Avalanche infrastructure and technical expertise. Deca4 is a Dubai firm working across blockchain, digital infrastructure and emerging technologies, and founder and chief executive Mohammed Mahfoudh described the arrangement as combining local implementation capability with Avalanche technology to build a scalable foundation for trusted digital documents and government services.

 

UAE PASS is the country's national digital identity platform, letting citizens, residents and visitors verify their identity, sign documents with legal recognition, and reach government and private services through a single credential. The platform connects to more than 15,000 services across over 350 entities and serves 12.5 million users.

The problem it addresses is one every institutional interaction runs into. Opening a bank account means proving an address and an identity, registering a company means proving a trade license, and enrolling at a university means proving a degree. The traditional answer is paper, which gets photocopied, notarized, couriered and verified again by every institution that receives it, because none of them can rely on a check another organisation performed. For the individual that means assembling the same proof repeatedly, and for the institution it means duplicated work on documents it cannot independently confirm are genuine.

The Digital Vault holds certified documents such as licences and academic degrees, letting a person request a document, hold it, and share it with an institution that needs to see it. Blockchain sits at the verification layer, storing cryptographic records that confirm a document's authenticity and expose tampering, while the documents themselves stay off-chain. A user shares a file, and the receiving organisation checks the cryptographic record to establish that the document has not been altered since issuance. Keeping personal data off the ledger is what allows a government to use a blockchain for a service covering millions of residents without exposing their records.

The shift that produces is where verification work happens. Verification occurs once, at issuance, and every institution downstream relies on it, which turns a check into a lookup and can compress onboarding that took days into minutes. Verifiable credentials have been discussed for over a decade, and the obstacle was never cryptographic but institutional, since getting an organisation to accept a verification it did not perform requires an issuer it already trusts. A national identity platform is one of the few things that qualifies, which is why national systems keep turning out to be where verifiable credentials actually get used. Users would never touch the blockchain directly under this design. No wallet, no AVAX holdings and no transaction fees enter the experience, because the verification layer runs underneath an app people already use for identity and signatures.

 

The Digital Vault runs on an Avalanche L1, meaning dedicated infrastructure instead of shared blockspace, and two consequences follow directly. Capacity is never contended by unrelated activity elsewhere on a network, so verification at a bank counter does not queue behind traffic with nothing to do with the UAE, and performance stays predictable instead of varying with conditions the operator cannot control. With 12.5 million users and 350 institutions attached, performance that varies by the hour is not workable. Network membership, permissioning and configuration also remain decisions the operator makes. TDRA holds oversight of the UAE PASS ecosystem, and that oversight only carries weight if the authority can set the terms of the infrastructure underneath it. A dedicated L1 makes that control structural instead of contractual, since the operator sets its own conditions instead of trusting another party to preserve them.

The same architecture already operates on the other side of the world. The California DMV has digitized 42 million vehicle titles on a DMV-run Avalanche L1, cutting a title transfer that previously took around two weeks down to minutes. Two public authorities serving tens of millions of people each, one handling identity credentials and the other property titles, arrived at the same structure, which suggests the requirements of public-sector record keeping push toward this shape.

 

Ava Labs built Evergreen specifically for institutions that need permissioned features on public infrastructure, offering deployments with KYC requirements and restricted validator sets while staying interoperable with the wider Avalanche network. Morgan Krupetsky, who runs institutional and capital markets business development at Ava Labs, has framed the pitch around the walled-garden problem, arguing that enterprise blockchain projects have historically isolated liquidity and blocked interoperability between initiatives.

Progmat completed a migration of digital securities infrastructure covering more than JPY 452 billion in total asset value to an Avalanche L1, according to an Avalanche Foundation announcement dated May 27, 2026. Intain launched a tokenized marketplace for asset-backed securities on an Avalanche L1, and ecosystem materials cite work involving INX Digital, T. Rowe Price and WisdomTree, alongside earlier institutional deployments connected to JPMorgan Onyx and Citi and a BlackRock BUIDL pilot. Tokenized real-world assets on the network have passed $1.3 billion, with stablecoin supply around $2.4 billion as of the first quarter, most of it USDC issued natively on the C-Chain by Circle.

A national identity system needs privacy guarantees, data residency compliance, uptime commitments and control over who validates, and a shared public execution environment handles none of those cleanly. Avalanche's model of independent chains with configurable validator sets addresses that category of requirement directly.

 

Helicon activates on Avalanche mainnet on Tuesday, September 22, 2026 at 11:00 AM ET shipping with AvalancheGo v1.15.0 after running on the Fuji testnet since July 28. Every mainnet node must upgrade before activation, and the plugin version moves to 46. ACP-194 brings continuous execution, previously called streaming asynchronous execution, to the C-Chain. Removing block execution from consensus lets the two run as parallel processes instead of a single serial pipeline, which creates throughput headroom without raising hardware requirements. ACP-236 introduces auto-renewed staking, ending the manual restaking cycle that has been a recurring administrative cost for anyone operating more than a handful of nodes. ACP-273 cuts the minimum validation period from 336 hours, two full weeks, to 48 hours.

ACP-267 raises the uptime requirement for validator rewards from 80% to 90%, applying to validations going forward while those already running stay on the old threshold for the remainder of their period. The requirement is all-or-nothing, with no partial credit. Snowman consensus samples validators when querying a block, so an offline node inside a sample causes failed queries and reissued requests, and the latency cost lands across the network while the absent operator pays nothing for it. ACP-285 lowers the minimum consumption rate from 10% to 7.5% over a 90-day rollout, recalibrating the reward curve to restore the premium for longer staking durations that had flattened over time. ACP-283 makes the minimum C-Chain gas price dynamic and governed by validators instead of fixed.

Developers running against Avalanche RPC have three things to check before activation. Helicon removes the admin, warp and personal namespaces entirely, along with three eth methods and eight non-trace debug methods, so calls to any of them will fail on an upgraded node. On the C-Chain, latest and pending now resolve to the last executed block while safe and finalized resolve to the last settled block, which changes results for any application with receipt-dependent logic. C-Chain state sync is unsupported around activation, and any hardcoded minimum gas price assumption needs removing.

 

The economics here run through staking and through the burn. Every C-Chain transaction burns its base fee instead of paying it to validators, following the EIP-1559 design, with more than 5.4 million AVAX burned cumulatively by early 2026 and daily burns running between 1,000 and 8,000 depending on activity. Throughput headroom from continuous execution matters to that mechanism only if transaction volume follows, since the burn scales with usage and not with capacity. A dedicated government L1 generates little direct AVAX demand on its own, because users hold no tokens and pay no fees.

The staking changes are aimed squarely at professional operators. Auto-renewed staking removes a recurring task, the 48-hour minimum validation period lowers the commitment threshold for entering, and the higher uptime bar raises the quality of the set by pushing out operators who cannot hold 90%. A government implementation partner running validators for a national system falls into exactly the category those changes serve.

The regulatory position underneath all of it changed in March, when the SEC and CFTC classified AVAX as a digital commodity in a joint final rule covering 16 assets, ending an enforcement grey area that had produced class-action claims arguing AVAX was sold as a security. Custodians requiring a definitive label can now hold it, VanEck's spot ETF listed in January and Grayscale's staking product began trading on Nasdaq in March, and enterprise clients building on Evergreen deployments have clear legal standing for the underlying token. Public procurement moves slowly and documents heavily because the consequences of getting it wrong are public, so infrastructure that clears that process has been tested against a different standard than infrastructure chosen by a market.

 

TDRA, the UAE's federal digital government authority, is upgrading the blockchain layer supporting the UAE PASS Digital Vault to Avalanche, in an upgrade announced on September 14. TDRA supervises the service, Deca4 leads local implementation, and Ava Labs supplies the infrastructure and technical expertise.

The platform serves 12.5 million citizens, residents and visitors, connects to more than 15,000 services across over 350 public and private entities, and covers identity verification, legally recognised digital signatures and access to official documents.

Capacity is never contended by unrelated network activity, so verification performance stays predictable instead of varying with conditions the operator does not control. And network membership, permissioning and configuration remain decisions TDRA makes, which matters because a government cannot outsource accountability for a system 12.5 million people depend on.

Yes; The California DMV has digitized 42 million vehicle titles on a DMV-run Avalanche L1, reducing a title transfer that once took around two weeks to minutes. Progmat also migrated digital securities infrastructure covering more than JPY 452 billion in asset value to an Avalanche L1 in May 2026.

No, Blockchain operates at the verification layer underneath an app people already use, storing cryptographic records that confirm document authenticity while contents stay off-chain, so no wallet, token holdings or transaction fees enter the user experience.

Progmat migrated digital securities infrastructure covering more than JPY 452 billion in asset value to an Avalanche L1 in May 2026. Intain launched a tokenized asset-backed securities marketplace on an Avalanche L1, and ecosystem materials cite INX Digital, T. Rowe Price and WisdomTree alongside earlier deployments tied to JPMorgan Onyx, Citi and a BlackRock BUIDL pilot. Tokenized real-world assets on the network have passed $1.3 billion.

Helicon activates on mainnet on September 22, 2026 at 11:00 AM ET with AvalancheGo v1.15.0, bundling six Avalanche Community Proposals. It brings continuous execution to the C-Chain, introduces auto-renewed staking, cuts the minimum validation period from two weeks to 48 hours, raises the validator uptime requirement from 80% to 90% for new validations, lowers the minimum consumption rate from 10% to 7.5% over 90 days, and makes the minimum C-Chain gas price dynamic.