UNLOCK Talks to Dubai Economic Department About new Business registry project

More Freezones to sign up in near future

UNLOCK met with Mohammad Khalifa AlQaizi, Director of Information technology division at Dubai Economic Department to discuss DED’s Commercial registry on the Blockchain. During the Future Blockchain Summit in Dubai, DED unveiled a Blockchain commercial registry project to improve the ease of business developed in collaboration, DSOA, Smart Dubai and IBM.

The joint initiative, called Dubai Blockchain Business Registry Project is aligned with the Dubai Blockchain Strategy, launched in 2016 by His Highness Sheikh Hamdan bin Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Crown Prince of Dubai and Chairman of the Executive Council of Dubai, seeking to establish Dubai as the first city to be fully powered by blockchain by 2020.

According to Al Qaizi, “DED has built a unified commercial registry project that can be used by all entities in Dubai and outside with no limitations on the technology. The project is the first Blockchain enabled trade license repository to store and update company registration information issued by DED as well as free zones. Today we started with DSOA (Dubai Silicon Oasis Authority) but in the future all free zone areas can join in as well as businesses in the mainland. We hope more will sign up sometime soon.”

The Blockchain commercial registry aims to facilitate the UAE Business ecosystem and bring in more foreign direct investment. He adds, “Our ambition is to have everything concerning commercial registries in one place so there is less dependency on document verification and the process of  setting up and doing business in Dubai becomes very smooth as well as regulatory compliant.”

According to Al Qaizi the Commercial register ledger is now up and running. He explains, “From now we can start adding partners based on a subscription model and each will have permission to access data based on their business roles. Entities can create smart contracts and automate the business process of registration as well as other features in the future even payment will be enabled on the registry as well.”

AlQaizi added, “The project was a result of an intensive research conducted by our IT team in collaboration with DSOA, IBM and Smart Dubai. We built the foundation for a first-of-its-kind unified business ledger where any entity locally and globally can join, and be part of Dubai’s vision to be the Blockchain capital of the world as part of the Dubai Blockchain strategy 2016.”

For further details check this related article.