Gulf Commodities to Go Digital
A United Arab Emirates investment group and Keeta, a U.S. blockchain company backed by tech billionaire Eric Schmidt, have launched a joint venture to tokenize physical Gulf commodities onto a public exchange accessible to global investors. The partnership between UAE-based ASK Group and Keeta plans to launch the public exchange by 2027.
According to a news release, the platform will convert physical assets like oil, gold, silver and copper into fractional digital tokens backed 1-to-1 by audited reserves. While retail and institutional investors currently rely on indirect exposure through futures or exchange-traded funds, the joint venture aims to democratize direct asset ownership. Under the plan, investors from Tokyo to London can purchase fractions of commodities with 400-millisecond settlement times and real-time, on-chain proof of reserves.
“This partnership is a long-term commitment to building the infrastructure that will define how trillions of dollars in real-world assets move,” said Sheikh Ahmed bin Sultan bin Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan of the ASK Group.
Beyond commodity tokenization, the initiative targets the Middle East’s high-volume cross-border remittance market. The UAE serves as a critical origination hub for global remittances, anchored by the $20 billion annual UAE-India corridor alongside major pipelines to Pakistan, the Philippines and Kenya.
Keeta’s technical infrastructure, which was stress-tested alongside Google’s Spanner engineering team, has achieved a verified 11.2 million transactions per second. The joint venture will deploy an “anchor model,” allowing licensed commercial banks, exchange houses and remittance providers to link into Keeta’s Layer 1 network via a single software development kit.
By utilizing a unified integration, regional financial institutions can bypass traditional intermediary banks, executing cross-border transfers in less than half a second.
“Together we are going to take assets and payment flows that have operated the same way for decades and put them on rails built for the next century,” said Ty Schenk, founder and chief executive of Keeta.
To address compliance, Keeta’s network features a native identity and regulatory architecture. Asset issuers can embed transfer restrictions, jurisdictional controls and investor accreditation rules directly into the commodity tokens. The network automatically enforces these parameters on subsequent transactions, eliminating third-party compliance intermediaries.
Under the exclusive agreement, ASK Group will manage and scale Keeta’s operational footprint across the UAE, the broader Middle East and Africa region, and India. Initial phases will focus on launching the UAE blueprint before expanding tokenization models to broader Gulf Cooperation Council markets.
