A license can be active on a public register and still be of no use to anyone for a day or a month. Bybit is in that position this week. Its Dubai entity, Bybit Fintech FZE, now holds a full virtual asset service provider license from the Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority (VARA), and it still cannot take a single Dubai customer.
The company announced the license on Thursday, and Cointelegraph reported the details on October 23, 2026. What follows covers what the Bybit Dubai license permits, what it does not yet, and the one question the exchange would not answer.
What VARA actually granted
The license covers exchange services, with spot trading named explicitly. VARA's public register shows it as active and lists three customer classes: retail, qualified and institutional investors. Retail deserves a note, since plenty of Gulf regimes court institutions first and leave ordinary users for a later phase, and Dubai's register, at least on its face, draws no such line here.
An earlier in-principle approval came first, and a Bybit spokesperson was direct about its limits. According to the company, that approval was non-operational and did not allow the entity to serve anyone in Dubai. The sequence is therefore provisional approval, full license, launch process, customers. Bybit has cleared the second step and is standing at the third.
The spokesperson said the exchange must still complete VARA's launch process and satisfy operational requirements before spot services can begin. No launch date was offered. Whether that means weeks or quarters the company gave no hint, and I would rather not guess.
Two licenses, one unanswered question
The Dubai license is not the exchange's first UAE credential. In October 2025, the federal Securities and Commodities Authority (SCA) granted Bybit its top-tier platform operator authorization for virtual assets. That approval sits with a separate entity, Bybit Virtual Asset Platform Operator LLC.
That entity's own service restrictions carve Dubai out of the places it serves. A federal license covering the whole country is thus held by an exchange that, on paper, cannot serve the country's biggest crypto hub under it.
The spokesperson was asked two things: what separates the VARA license from the SCA approval, and whether the earlier federal license permitted Dubai services. Both questions went unanswered. Caution is warranted, then. The record shows only that the SCA entity excludes Dubai and that the VARA entity now has permission the SCA one apparently did not extend to that emirate.
Two readings are open. One is that Dubai's regulator wants its own relationship with any exchange operating in its jurisdiction, whatever the federal paperwork says. The other is that the split reflects nothing more than how the two entities were set up. Nobody at Bybit or VARA has said which, and the first strikes me as the likelier, but that is inference.
Spot is the headline, and the silence around it
Only spot trading appears in the announcement. Nothing disclosed addresses derivatives, margin products or any other category of service, and Bybit has not said what, if anything, falls outside the license's reach. Readers who have seen shorthand suggesting derivatives are definitively barred in Dubai should note that the released facts do not establish that either way. The license is described as covering exchange services including spot, and the boundaries beyond spot have not been spelled out in public.
Bybit is widely known for its product breadth, so a spot-only launch would be a much smaller business than the global platform. I expect users and analysts to press the company on scope once the launch process finishes. Until then, scope is a blank.
Why a launch process can take a while
VARA licensing is not a single gate. Winning the license and going live are separate events, and the gap can be substantial. The regulator expects an operator to demonstrate working systems, controls and compliance arrangements before customers come in. Bybit has described exactly this: license in hand, operational checklist unfinished.
Such gaps are common in regulated finance and need alarm no one. They do mean that any claim that Bybit is "live in Dubai" is premature. Customers in the emirate cannot sign up for spot trading through this entity yet.
Cointelegraph also noted a recent memorandum of understanding between VARA and Securitize on tokenization work in the emirate. It is a separate matter, though it fits a regulator assembling a regime where licensed players and tokenized assets coexist.
What to watch
Three developments would tell us more than the license itself.
First, a launch date. Until Bybit names one, the license is a permit with no product attached. A date, or a pilot with a limited user group, would show how near the exchange is to finishing VARA's requirements.
Second, product scope. If the Dubai entity's terms of service, once published, list only spot pairs, that answers the derivatives question by inference. If they list more, the framing changes.
Third, the SCA entity's Dubai exclusion. If Bybit amends its restrictions or explains the split between its two UAE licenses, we would learn how the federal and emirate-level regimes fit together in practice. The company declined that conversation this week, and it may struggle to avoid it once real customers ask which entity they are dealing with.