Keeta and ASK Group Announce Joint Venture to Modernize Global Finance From the UAE

The collaboration brings one of the world’s most scalable blockchain networks together with UAE sovereign leadership to transform cross-border remittance and open tens of billions of dollars in Gulf commodities to global investors for the first time.

Keeta, the Layer 1 blockchain company unifying cross-network payments and asset transfers with built-in compliance and 400-millisecond settlement, and ASK Group, the UAE-based investment and operating group led by His Highness Sheikh Ahmed bin Sultan bin Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan, announced a joint venture with two defining ambitions. First, they plan to fundamentally modernize the exchange of value across borders in the Middle East and beyond. Second, they plan to tokenize physical Gulf commodities onto a public exchange accessible to global investors for the first time.

The partnership represents one of the most significant blockchain infrastructure initiatives to emerge from the Gulf region, combining sovereign institutional backing with technology that has been stress-tested at a scale comparable to the world’s largest payment networks.

Eric Schmidt, the former Chief Executive of Google and one of the most closely watched technology investors of his generation, is a major investor in Keeta. The company’s network was tested in collaboration with Google’s Spanner engineering team, achieving 11.2 million transactions per second with 400-millisecond settlement finality. This verified achievement has drawn significant attention from institutional investors and financial technology firms evaluating next-generation settlement infrastructure globally.

“As a global financial center, the UAE is determined to lead the world as we enter this new era,” said His Highness Sheikh Ahmed bin Sultan bin Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan. “This partnership is a long-term commitment to building the infrastructure that will define how trillions of dollars in real-world assets move.”

Reimagining Cross-Border Remittance
The UAE is home to one of the world’s most internationally diverse populations. Millions of residents send money to families across South Asia, Africa, Southeast Asia, and beyond, collectively making the UAE one of the highest-volume remittance origination markets on earth. The UAE-India corridor alone moves approximately $20 billion annually. The UAE-Philippines, UAE-Pakistan, and UAE-Kenya corridors together add tens of billions more.

These flows represent some of the most economically significant transfers of value in the world, money that supports families, funds education, and sustains communities across developing economies. The people sending it deserve infrastructure that is fast, transparent, and affordable.

Keeta’s settlement network addresses this directly. Through its anchor model—a framework in which licensed financial institutions connect their existing infrastructure to Keeta’s network and become registered settlement participants—cross-border value transfer that previously required multiple intermediaries and significant time can settle in under 400 milliseconds. A sender in Dubai initiates a transfer. The anchor on the UAE side processes the transaction onto Keeta’s network. The receiving anchor in India, the Philippines, or Kenya delivers local currency to the recipient. The entire process completes in under a second.

The anchor model is deliberately designed to work with existing regulated institutions rather than around them. Banks, exchange houses, payment companies, and remittance providers integrate with Keeta through a single SDK connection, accessing every corridor on the network from one technical integration rather than building bilateral relationships with counterparties in each market. For the UAE’s large and well-established exchange house sector, this represents a significant operational and commercial opportunity.

“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.

Opening the Gulf’s Commodity Markets to the World
The Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) region is home to some of the world’s largest concentrations of physical commodity wealth, including oil, gold, silver, copper, and a range of industrial metals whose global significance extends far beyond the region’s borders. Despite this, direct investment exposure to these physical assets has historically been available only to a narrow group of producers, sovereign institutions, and large-scale institutional traders. Futures markets and exchange-traded funds offer indirect exposure, but the underlying physical assets themselves have remained largely inaccessible to the broader global investor base.

The Keeta-ASK Group joint venture is designed to change that. By 2027, the partnership aims to have established a Keeta-powered public exchange on which physical Gulf commodities are represented as digital tokens, each backed one-to-one by assets held in audited physical custody, with on-chain proof of reserves verifiable in real time by any participant on the network.

The result is direct fractional ownership of physical Gulf commodities, available to investors globally, settling in under a second, around the clock. A retail investor in Tokyo, an institutional fund in London, or a family office in Singapore will have the same direct access to a barrel of Gulf crude or an ounce of UAE-held gold as the largest commodity trading houses have historically enjoyed, with complete transparency over what they own and where it is held.

The scale of the addressable market is substantial. Global commodity markets move several trillion dollars annually. The GCC’s share of the world’s proven oil reserves alone represents an asset base whose tokenization would constitute one of the largest migrations of real-world value onto blockchain infrastructure in history.

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The Technology Behind the Partnership
Keeta is a Layer 1 blockchain network whose architecture was built specifically for the throughput, compliance, and speed demands of institutional financial markets.

Its unparalleled transaction-per-second performance and settlement times place it in a different class from existing blockchain infrastructure. These achievements make Keeta capable of supporting not only human-initiated transactions but also the growing volume of machine-speed financial activity generated by algorithmic systems and autonomous AI agents as well.

The network’s native compliance architecture allows issuers of tokenized assets to embed regulatory conditions—including transfer restrictions, investor accreditation requirements, and jurisdictional controls—directly into the token at the point of creation. The network enforces these conditions automatically on every subsequent transaction, without requiring separate operational processes or third-party compliance intermediaries. For commodity markets and cross-border payment corridors with complex regulatory profiles spanning multiple jurisdictions, this is a core commercial requirement.

In addition, Keeta’s digital identity framework verifies participants once and carries those credentials across every product and market on the network, removing the repeated onboarding processes that add cost and friction to financial platforms operating at scale. For remittance users sending money regularly across the same corridor, this means a single verified identity that works across every transaction, every time.

The UAE as the Natural Home
The UAE has built one of the world’s most sophisticated and deliberately constructed regulatory environments for digital assets. The Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority (VARA) in Dubai, the Financial Services Regulatory Authority (FSRA) in Abu Dhabi Global Market (ADGM), and the federal Capital Markets Authority together constitute a framework that has attracted institutional capital, global banks, and technology companies seeking the combination of regulatory clarity and jurisdictional credibility that serious financial infrastructure demands.

That environment is a significant part of why the Keeta-ASK Group partnership is being established here. The UAE sits at the intersection of the world’s most dynamic trade and remittance corridors, connecting South Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia, Europe, and the broader Middle East in a geography that maps almost exactly onto the markets where Keeta’s settlement network is designed to operate. ASK Group, led by His Highness Sheikh Ahmed bin Sultan bin Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan and active across infrastructure, fintech, blockchain, real estate, and sports, holds exclusive rights to facilitate and execute Keeta’s presence across the UAE, MEA, and India. The combination of Keeta’s technical infrastructure and ASK Group’s sovereign-level institutional relationships creates a partnership whose reach extends well beyond a commercial arrangement between two companies.

Future phases of the partnership will expand across additional remittance corridors, commodity categories, and GCC markets, with the foundation built in the UAE serving as the operational and regulatory blueprint for the region’s broader engagement with next-generation financial infrastructure.

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