Robinhood Wins DFSA License, Targets 2027 Launch From Dubai

Robinhood Markets has won authorization from the Dubai Financial Services Authority to offer retail trading and custody across ten asset classes, including bitcoin, other cryptocurrencies, equities, ETFs and investment tokens, the company said in a statement Wednesday. The platform plans to go live in the region in 2027 from a new hub in the Dubai International Financial Centre, which will serve as its Middle East and North Africa headquarters.

The license is the verified core fact here, and its scope matters more than the headline. The DFSA has signed off on Robinhood holding client digital assets directly, not merely routing trades. For a firm that needed years to enable bitcoin withdrawals in the United States, clearing custody from day one in a new jurisdiction says a great deal about how far its crypto operation has matured.

Salah Kaddoura has been named senior executive officer and president of Robinhood MENA. The title is DFSA-recognized, which effectively makes him the person regulators call first. He will build out the Dubai team ahead of launch.

Vlad Tenev, Robinhood's chairman and CEO, framed the move in global terms. "The DIFC is one of the world's most important financial hubs, and our expansion there brings us closer to building a global platform that enables anyone, anywhere to own the highest quality financial assets," he said in the company statement.

Where does Dubai fit in Robinhood's map?

The MENA hub extends a deliberate run of expansion beyond the United States, where the app made its name with young investors trading single stocks. The milestones stack up quickly:

• Entered the United Kingdom in 2024
• Opened full operations in the European Union last year
• Won in-principle approval for brokerage services in Singapore in April
• Closed its purchase of Canadian crypto platform WonderFi in June
• Added weekend trading and perpetual futures at home in September

The company now counts more than one million customers outside the US.

Johann Kerbrat, who runs crypto and international for Robinhood, tied the Dubai move to a wave of new retail investors in the region. Kerbrat is the same executive who disclosed on October 7 that Robinhood had placed $25 million of bitcoin on its own balance sheet, the first time the firm held BTC as a corporate asset rather than on behalf of customers. That treasury decision and this license point in the same direction: crypto is no longer a side product.

What does this change for the market?

Robinhood arrives in a financial center that keeps growing despite regional tension. The DIFC passed 10,000 active registered firms this year and continues to draw global names, with Ken Griffin's Citadel among them. In March it opened a cluster of new towers offering 600,000 square feet of commercial space, with Deutsche Bank and Moody's among the tenants, according to Bloomberg. Proprietary trading firm Maven said this week it will close its New York office as it shifts weight toward Dubai.

Competition will not be thin. The DIFC listed 72 authorized brokerages as of March 31, and several crypto-native exchanges already hold licenses from Dubai's separate Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority, the emirate's other regulator for digital assets.

Three open questions will shape the actual size of the bet. Robinhood has not said which countries the platform will serve at launch. It has not disclosed pricing. And it has not defined how "eligible investors" will be classified, which is the variable that ultimately decides the addressable market in the region.

For now, the pieces are in place: a DFSA license covering custody and retail execution, a named regulatory officer in Kaddoura, and a headquarters in a zone that houses ten thousand firms. The gap between authorization and launch is where the details live, and the 2027 go-live date gives Robinhood roughly a year to fill them in before its first trade in the Gulf.