Deribit, the crypto derivatives exchange Coinbase acquired for roughly $2.9 billion, has secured a Broker-Dealer Licence from Dubai’s Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority (VARA), Coinbase . The licence routes Deribit’s spot buy, sell and trade orders directly into Coinbase Exchange’s centralised order book, deepening the integration between the two platforms roughly a year after the acquisition closed.
What the licence actually changes
Deribit is not new to VARA. The exchange has held a VARA Exchange Services licence covering spot trading since January 2025, and was the first derivatives exchange to receive VARA regulatory approval. The Broker-Dealer Licence announced this week is a distinct, additional authorisation, not a replacement, and it specifically targets the connection between Deribit’s spot order flow and Coinbase’s own liquidity.
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Under the new licence, assets Deribit clients purchase through spot trading can remain inside Deribit’s ecosystem and serve as collateral for derivatives positions, while the orders themselves route through Coinbase Exchange’s order book rather than Deribit’s historically thinner spot liquidity. Deribit has been dominated by Bitcoin and Ether options and derivatives rather than spot trading; the licence is expected to eventually support listing hundreds of additional assets beyond that historical focus.
Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong said, “the approval is a significant moment for Deribit and Coinbase. It shows the UAE is really embracing modern finance and digital assets.”
A year-later integration, not a new market entry
Coinbase’s acquisition of Deribit was announced in May 2025, for roughly $700 million in cash plus 11 million Coinbase Class A shares, and closed in August 2025. Deribit came into the deal as one of the largest crypto derivatives venues globally, recording more than $185 billion in trading volume in July 2025 alone and holding roughly $60 billion in platform open interest at the time the acquisition completed.
Read against that timeline, this week’s licence is less a market-entry story and more a structural integration milestone: almost exactly a year after the deal closed, Coinbase is wiring Deribit’s spot flow into its own order book under a new, specific VARA authorisation, rather than leaving the two platforms’ liquidity separate.
What’s next
Neither Coinbase nor Deribit has disclosed a timeline for when the ‘hundreds of additional assets’ the licence is expected to support will actually list, or projected spot-volume figures once the Coinbase order-book routing is live.
