Dubai’s Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority (VARA) and BlackRock-backed tokenization platform Securitize signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to advance tokenization and digital asset infrastructure across the United Arab Emirates and Dubai.

The MoU will establish a collaborative framework to support regulated tokenization initiatives, foster institutional participation and strengthen Dubai’s digital asset ecosystem, the companies said in a Thursday announcement shared with Cointelegraph.

VARA and Securitize seek to support tokenization initiatives in Dubai, including projects initiated by VARA, to attract more talent and explore how tokenized financial products should operate under Dubai’s regulatory framework.

Tokenization initiatives are also gaining traction in other financial technology-focused jurisdictions. Days earlier, the London Stock Exchange reportedly partnered with crypto exchange Kraken to launch tokenized stock trading on the operator’s night-time trading venue to offer 24/5 trading.

Related: London Stock Exchange partners with Kraken parent for tokenized UK stocks: FT

Tokenization is evolving into “mainstream” financial infrastructure: Securitize CEO

Dubai emerged as one of the “world’s most forward-looking jurisdictions for digital asset innovation,” said Carlos Domingo, co-founder and CEO of Securitize, emphasizing the importance of collaborating with regulators as tokenization moves from “concept to mainstream financial infrastructure.” 

At the beginning of July, VARA granted its 50th virtual asset service provider (VASP) license to tokenization platform Tribe Tokenisation FZE.

When asked about the specific infrastructure goals, a spokesperson for VARA told Cointelegraph that the MoU’s main goal is to create a broad framework for collaboration between the two firms, rather than a specific technological stack or product. She told Cointelegraph:

“The intention is to combine VARA’s regulatory perspective with Securitize’s experience in institutional tokenisation to identify where collaboration can help support the development of trusted, regulated tokenised markets in Dubai.” 

There won’t be any specific projects announced “at this stage” of the MoU, but the agreement will provide a collaborative framework to “support relevant tokenisation initiatives in Dubai,” added the spokesperson. 

Total RWA asset value, all-time chart. Source: RWA.xyz 

The announcement follows increasing investor demand for tokenized assets, which has seen total RWA holders rise 103% in the past 30 days to 3.2 million. The total value of tokenized assets also rose 2% to $38.5 billion in the same period, according to data provider RWA.xyz. 

Securitize ranks as the world’s largest tokenization platform with $4.9 billion in tokenized assets under management (AUM). Ondo Finance ranks second with $3.5 billion.

Magazine: How Hong Kong is turning tokenized bonds into real market infrastructure

• Flowra and KorDA will explore gold-backed collateral for Solana validators.
• KGLD could help secure SOL for a proposed validator delegation program.
• The 12-month MOU remains subject to regulatory review and due diligence.

Flowra Ltd. and Korea Gold Exchange Digital Asset Co., Ltd. (KorDA) have signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) to explore using gold-backed digital assets to support Solana validator infrastructure.

The partnership will examine whether KGLD, a gold-backed digital asset held or managed by KorDA or an authorized affiliate, could be used as collateral to secure SOL.

The companies said the SOL could then be delegated to Solana validators through Flowra’s infrastructure, potentially creating a link between tokenized gold and the operation of the Solana network.

The MOU, signed in Seoul, has an initial 12-month term.

During that period, the companies will evaluate the proposed structure, potential counterparties, and the requirements for launching a delegation program.

Gold-backed assets could support SOL

Under the proposed model, Flowra and KorDA would explore sourcing SOL from the Solana Foundation, exchanges, institutional investors, lending providers, and other large SOL holders.

The companies are also considering the Flowra-KorDA Delegation Program (FKDP), which would allocate sourced SOL to eligible Solana validators.

The proposed arrangement would use KGLD as collateral rather than having tokenized gold directly operate validator infrastructure.

The companies are examining whether gold-backed assets could help unlock capital for SOL, which could subsequently be delegated to validators.

The initiative reflects a potential use case for real-world assets beyond simply holding or trading tokenized assets onchain.

However, the companies have not said that the proposed structure has been launched or that KGLD is currently being used as collateral for SOL.

Any use of KGLD as collateral, as well as arrangements for sourcing or delegating SOL, remains subject to legal and regulatory review, due diligence, and separate definitive agreements.

Flowra and KorDA to split infrastructure roles

Flowra would provide the Solana infrastructure for the proposed initiative, including its Open Orderflow Auction (OOA), Programmable Block Policy (PBP) and Block Engine technology.

KorDA would oversee validator operations, including servers, monitoring and key management.

The two companies would also work on standards for selecting validators, allocating SOL and distributing revenue generated through staking rewards, block rewards and MEV tips.

The companies said any collateral used under the proposed structure would be segregated from Flowra’s assets.

It would be held through an eligible independent custodian, escrow arrangement or multisignature wallet.

Flowra would not custody the collateral.

The structure is therefore still at the evaluation stage, with the MOU providing a framework for the companies to assess how the proposed delegation model could operate and what counterparties and regulatory requirements would be needed.

Proposed program remains under evaluation

The potential partnership is centered on connecting a gold-backed digital asset with blockchain infrastructure.

Instead of tokenized gold being limited to onchain ownership or trading, Flowra and KorDA are exploring whether it could be used as collateral to help provide access to SOL for validator delegation.

The proposed FKDP would allocate sourced SOL to eligible validators, while Flowra and KorDA would establish the operational and revenue-distribution framework.

KorDA is affiliated with ITCEN Group and develops blockchain solutions focused on tokenization and blockchain use of precious metals, including gold-backed digital assets such as KGLD.

Flowra focuses on validator and order flow infrastructure for the Solana ecosystem, including delegation programs and MEV-related technologies.

The companies will use the initial 12-month MOU period to assess the proposed structure and determine whether the delegation program can move forward.

Any eventual implementation would require further agreements, due diligence, and regulatory review.

Freya: When I was young, I didn’t really understand the significance of the day. But around the 10th anniversary, I realized, “Oh, this is huge,” and then it became very depressing. On the morning announcements at school, they’d show a video tribute, and those videos were obviously very sad. In middle school, some kid told me that I was the reincarnation of Osama bin Laden. So I used to wish I was born on the 10th or the 12th. I actually didn’t celebrate my birthday from ages 10 to 13. It just felt inappropriate and weird to be so happy when everyone else was not. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve told people my birthday, and it becomes a whole conversation. When I need ID at a bar or when I have to pick up a prescription, and they ask me for my birthday, they’re like, “Really?” I’ve even had people ask me, “What was that like for you?” And I have to say, “Well, I was not even born yet so I was not aware of anything.” I’ve learned to just say my birthday is in September. However, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized that I like my birthday. It’s such a beautiful time of year. I’m at the point where I can acknowledge that it was sad, but I can also celebrate myself. All my friends tell me that when they think of 9/11, they think of me as their first thought. 

Argentina’s Public Prosecutor’s Office has trained prosecutors, officials and staff to trace, analyse and seize virtual assets as cryptocurrency plays a larger role in criminal investigations across the country.

The Ministerio Público Fiscal, or MPF, said it held a specialised course titled “Virtual Assets: Financial Analysis, Tracing, Detection and Seizure” as part of its optional academic programme, with sessions conducted remotely on Aug. 19 and Sept. 2.

The training was restricted to employees, officials and magistrates within the institution and focused on the technical knowledge required when digital assets become part of financial or criminal investigations.

Carmen Chena, a lawyer specialising in anti-money laundering controls, led the sessions through Zoom. The programme covered financial analysis of digital wallets, cryptocurrency tracing, asset recovery and the legal procedures available when investigators seek to restrict or seize digital funds.

Argentina prosecutors study crypto tracing and seizures

The course began with changes in asset recovery methods created by virtual assets before moving into financial and patrimonial analysis of digital wallets.

Participants studied Argentina’s domestic legal framework alongside international rules governing virtual assets and examined the structure of the cryptocurrency ecosystem. The programme covered different methods for imposing precautionary measures on digital funds and used practical cases to show how such procedures can work during an investigation.

For the MPF, the subject falls within its role as an independent institution in Argentina’s justice system. The agency promotes judicial action in defence of legality and the general interests of society, while one of its central responsibilities is directing public criminal investigations.

Crypto tracing has already become part of several major Argentine cases, requiring investigators to follow transactions across wallets, blockchain networks and exchanges.

In July, an Argentine judge ordered the identification of people behind 25 cryptocurrency wallets connected to the $LIBRA investigation and ordered assets linked to the addresses frozen.

Investigators had reconstructed movements involving millions of dollars across several blockchain networks. A report from the Cybercrime Technical Department of the Argentine Federal Police found that four of eight wallets identified as belonging to the Libra Team had consolidated funds into a single address.

Authorities later traced 498,539 USDT transferred through a cross-chain protocol to a wallet on the Tron network. The receiving address divided the funds into 17 transactions, while investigators identified transfers involving Binance, Bybit, OKX and Bitfinex.

The court sought know-your-customer records, IP addresses, transaction histories and other information that could help identify people behind the transactions.

$LIBRA probe has required extensive wallet analysis

The $LIBRA case has given Argentine investigators a recent example of the technical work required when crypto assets move through several addresses and trading platforms.

Crypto.news previously reported in July that investigators were examining roughly $8.2 million that had remained dormant before moving again in May through wallets placed under judicial scrutiny.

The investigation stems from the February 2025 launch of LIBRA, a token promoted on social media by Argentine President Javier Milei. Its price climbed rapidly following Milei’s post before collapsing, triggering criminal and civil investigations into the people involved with the project.

Phone records reviewed by prosecutors later showed that Milei had seven calls with an entrepreneur connected to LIBRA around the time of his social media post. Investigators did not disclose what was discussed during the calls.

Milei has denied wrongdoing and previously said his involvement was limited to sharing information about what he understood to be a private project supporting the Argentine economy.

The judicial investigation has continued to examine financial relationships, communications and transactions associated with LIBRA. Prosecutors have had to analyse both conventional records and blockchain activity as they reconstruct the movement of funds linked to the token.

Such investigations can require authorities to identify wallet addresses, establish links between addresses and individuals, follow assets when they move between blockchains and obtain customer records when funds pass through centralised exchanges.

Those subjects overlap with the MPF course, which specifically covered financial analysis of digital wallets, tracing methods, precautionary measures and asset seizure procedures.

Argentine courts have previously frozen stablecoins

Argentina’s justice system had already used crypto tracing and asset restrictions before the LIBRA investigation.

In December 2024, an Argentine court seized a USDT wallet containing approximately $3.5 million during an investigation into Rainbowex, an alleged trading Ponzi scheme.

Authorities froze cryptocurrency wallets and bank accounts connected to the case, while experts from Argentine crypto platform Lemon and blockchain forensic firms Chainalysis and Qlue provided technical support to trace the funds.

More than 15 raids were carried out across Argentina as part of the Rainbowex investigation, and at least four people were arrested. Authorities worked with Interpol to locate individuals from Malaysia suspected of involvement in creating and operating the platform.

Rainbowex had offered investors daily returns of between 1% and 2%, with the alleged scheme affecting people in San Pedro, Buenos Aires.

Argentine courts have dealt with other disputes involving the recovery of cryptocurrency. In 2022, a court ordered Binance to return Bitcoin to the victim of a theft, another example of judicial authorities dealing directly with digital assets held or transferred through crypto platforms.

The MPF’s training comes as cryptocurrency use has remained substantial in Argentina. Stablecoins accounted for 94% of peso-denominated cryptocurrency trading volume in data published by a16z Crypto on Aug. 30 using figures from Artemis.

The analysis estimated that roughly one in five Argentines uses cryptocurrency, while downloads of the country’s 15 leading crypto applications increased 93% during 2024 compared with the previous year.

Argentina has formalised oversight of crypto providers

Crypto businesses operating in Argentina have faced a more defined registration and compliance system as authorities bring virtual asset providers within existing financial oversight structures.

The National Securities Commission, known locally as the CNV, maintains the country’s Virtual Asset Service Provider registry. Companies admitted to the system must comply with requirements connected to anti-money laundering and counter-terrorism financing controls.

Bitget, for example, secured VASP registration in Argentina in June, bringing the exchange within the country’s regulatory framework for cryptocurrency service providers.

Registered businesses are subject to reporting and compliance obligations involving Argentina’s Financial Information Unit and other relevant authorities.

At the same time, cryptocurrency activity has extended into products being developed by traditional financial groups. In July, BIND Group and Petersen Group were developing peso stablecoins through separate digital-asset businesses for uses including programmable payments, treasury operations, collateral management and onchain settlement.

For prosecutors investigating transactions within that expanding ecosystem, the MPF course covered both the national and international rules applicable to virtual assets, alongside the practical methods used to analyse wallets, trace transactions and apply precautionary measures to cryptocurrency funds.

The price of lumber has declined 35% since crypto exchanges first listed crypto-native lumber contracts for trading.

At the time, using blockchain technologies to tokenize, trade, or track an off-blockchain commodity seemed like a welcome revolution.

The price of lumber, in early 2021 during the COVID housing boom, had been rallying amid soaring demand for home renovation projects and limited supply from quarantined workers and broken supply chains.

When a client named Rusty contacted crypto recovery specialist Chris Brooks in 2021, he said he and two others had won 5,000 Bitcoin in a court case, worth around $53 million at the time.

They immediately set up a Zoom call to discuss the case.

“There were three guys on the call, and one of them holds up a phone. It has like $53 million in a Bitcoin address,” says Brooks, founder and chief executive of Crypto Asset Recovery.

The men claimed they were able to withdraw as much as $300,000 a week but wanted to get the whole fortune out. If Brooks and his son, Charlie, flew to Georgia to help them crack the wallet, they would make them millionaires.

Brooks and son bought plane tickets and went the next day.

At lunch, Rusty, a 6-foot-3 Army veteran, revealed the wallet didn’t only contain 5000 BTC.

“Rusty pulls out his phone, and he shows us a billion dollars in ETH. And that’s when I was like, okay, something very odd is going on here.”

The men then drove about an hour to a strip mall owned by one of them, where they went into the back office and were handed notebooks containing dozens of recovery seeds. The pair spent the day opening wallets.

They found about $10 in Bitcoin.

Brooks never established whether the wallets they were given had previously held the BTC or ETH Rusty claimed to own. They were never reimbursed for the flight tickets either.

Related: Do the Coldcard attacks mean all hardware wallets are now insecure?

Brooks now suspects Rusty had fallen victim to scammers who convinced him he had a large crypto fortune when he didn’t.

It was an early lesson for their crypto recovery business.

Sometimes crypto is lost. Sometimes the wallet is lost. Sometimes the password is lost.

And sometimes, it turns out, the money was never there in the first place.

Losing your crypto doesn’t always mean it’s gone

For wallet recovery specialists, “lost crypto” can mean several very different things.

They aren’t recovering Bitcoin from the blockchain; they’re recovering the information needed to access a wallet that already exists.

While someone may have thrown away a hardware wallet, forgotten a password or part of their seed phrase, none of those things necessarily mean the underlying crypto has disappeared.

Bruno Krauss, co-founder and chief technical officer of recovery firm ReWallet, tells Magazine:

“If you have some missing words, then you can often recover them.”

Bitcoin’s BIP39 seed phrase standard uses a list of 2,048 words, meaning that if someone knows most of the words, specialists can sometimes systematically search the remaining possibilities. The fewer pieces missing, the more manageable the puzzle.

Password recovery can work in much the same way.

Bitcoin’s BIP39 standard uses a list of 2,048 words. Source: GitHub

Krauss says ReWallet once recovered a 20-character password protecting roughly $3 million after reverse-engineering a flawed password generator.

Other cases depend less on technical exploits than on understanding how a particular person creates passwords.

That means asking clients about personal preferences like favorite foods and places, children’s names and birthdays, personal milestones or memories.

In one case, he says a customer was convinced she had used her children’s names, only to remember that the password was actually a phone number connected to a local delivery service:

“She didn’t know why, but then she thought about it, and she realized, oh, okay, it was because on this day I got the package delivered to the store and I thought, okay, this would be a nice password.”

Passphrases add another layer of complexity

Tom Bennet, a Bitcoin educator who has studied wallet security, says there is another particularly confusing category: the passphrase.

A passphrase is an additional piece of information layered on top of a seed. Enter a different passphrase, and you don’t necessarily get an error message. You can simply get another valid wallet. He tells Magazine:

“A wrong passphrase doesn’t throw an error; it succeeds and shows you a zero balance.”

So you can have the correct seed phrase and enter it correctly, and still think your BTC has vanished.

“Passphrases also don’t have any features to protect users from themselves; no list of 2,048 valid words, no checksum. So if you’ve forgotten a passphrase, it’s basically the same question again: how random was your passphrase? If it’s sufficiently random, there’s often no way to recover it.”

With lost or broken hardware wallets, even having the broken device isn’t always much help. If the wallet’s backup seed phrase survives, the keys can generally be restored on another device.

That’s why recovery specialists don’t necessarily need the original hardware, but enough information to reconstruct access to the keys.

Related: Irish police open Bitcoin wallet years after keys were apparently lost

Recovery can also mean fixing mistakes rather than recovering a lost wallet. Crypto sent to the wrong blockchain, like BNB to Ethereum, may sometimes be recoverable if the receiving wallet is under the user’s control.

Brooks says Crypto Asset Recovery has been contracted to crack more than 3,000 wallets belonging to around 1,500 people, and has cracked passwords for about 63% of them.

Sometimes you really have lost it

There is, however, a hard boundary. Bennet says:

“If your seed is truly random and you lose it completely, your Bitcoin is gone.”

That is one of the fundamental trade-offs of self-custody. A Bitcoin wallet does not have a bank-style recovery system or a central administrator who can verify your identity and restore your account.

Lucien Bourdon, Bitcoin analyst at hardware wallet maker Trezor, puts it even more starkly. If the wallet backup is lost and the wallet containing the keys is inaccessible, “no recovery company can help.” He warns:

“If they could, the wallet could be cracked, and self-custody would be fundamentally compromised.”

Thanks to randomness, crypto wallets make guessing a private key effectively impossible. In the recent case of Bitcoin hardware wallet Coldcard, a firmware bug weakened seed randomness on some wallets, making the seeds brute-forceable without physical access.

Weak random number generation is not a new problem. Source: Jameson Lopp

But if a genuinely random seed or private key has been completely destroyed, the number of possibilities is simply too large.

Krauss says recovery specialists can occasionally find technical paths into wallets that owners had assumed were permanently inaccessible, and that old wallet software, corrupted files, poorly generated passwords and hardware vulnerabilities can all create unusual opportunities:

“Don’t give up on edge cases.”

Recovery specialists can sometimes be scammers

There is an uncomfortable irony in the recovery business.

The person who may be able to help you regain access to your crypto needs the very information that gives someone access to it.

A seed phrase isn’t like a password that can be changed after someone sees it. Anyone who possesses the necessary wallet backup can often control the funds.

That makes choosing a recovery specialist a security decision in itself. Bourdon says:

“If you decide to do it, do the homework. Look for firms with a real track record and reviews you can trace to actual customers. Check that they charge on success rather than up front. And move your funds to a fresh wallet with a new backup as soon as you’re back in.”

He says users should also be wary of any unsolicited messages claiming that someone can recover their funds.

Krauss says other warning signs include people pushing users onto WhatsApp or contacting them from personal email addresses like Gmail, demanding upfront payments or asking them to open accounts at an exchange.

Recovery firms that charge a percentage of successfully recovered funds are not unusual; but paying money upfront to someone who promises to recover a wallet should set alarm bells ringing.

Brooks learned another lesson from the Rusty case.

While crypto recovery might sound like a technical job, a person who believes they are sitting on millions or billions of dollars can also be a security risk.

Crypto Asset Recovery no longer flies out to meet clients in person as it did with Rusty. The company now handles cases remotely, with sensitive wallet information processed through automated and air-gapped systems.

Brooks says around 71% of the wallets they crack contain less than $100, and the company doesn’t charge a fee for asset recovery under that amount.

If there’s one thing he wishes crypto users knew about asset recovery, it’s this:

“Learn what in the world a recovery seed is and why they’re important. That’s the simplest way to make sure you never have to talk to us.”

Magazine: Mystery surrounds why an OG burned $1M in Bitcoin