Deribit to route most spot orders to Coinbase under new Dubai licence

Deribit has received a Broker-Dealer Licence from Dubai's Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority, allowing the Coinbase-owned derivatives platform to route most spot orders to Coinbase Exchange for execution, the companies announced on August 13.

Deribit will remain the client-facing venue and keep its derivatives ecosystem intact; Coinbase Exchange takes over as the main execution and liquidity source for the upgraded spot product. Deribit FZE has held a VARA VASP licence for Exchange Services since January 2025, which already permitted spot trading under certain restrictions. The new Broker-Dealer Licence adds a separate permission layered on top of that existing licence, upgrading rather than replacing the spot trading model Deribit already had in place. The two licences now sit side by side: the original Exchange Services permission covers Deribit's own venue functions, while the Broker-Dealer Licence specifically authorizes routing client orders out to a third-party execution venue.

Under the new structure, orders placed on Deribit route automatically to Coinbase Exchange, one of the largest centralized orderbooks in crypto, while the platform's interface and derivatives ecosystem stay unchanged for the end user. A small number of assets will keep executing on Deribit's own orderbook as a fallback. The upgraded spot experience is available to retail, qualified, and institutional clients, though Deribit's Dubai derivatives permissions remain limited to qualified and institutional investors only. Neither company disclosed which specific assets will remain on Deribit's own orderbook rather than routing to Coinbase, or how the fallback list might change over time.

“This licence marks the moment the Coinbase acquisition starts delivering directly for our clients.”

— Luuk Strijers, Senior Director and Head of International Derivatives, Coinbase

• New VARA Broker-Dealer Licence lets Deribit route most spot orders to Coinbase Exchange for execution
• Deribit stays the client-facing venue and keeps its full derivatives ecosystem
• Builds on Deribit's existing VARA Exchange Services licence, held since January 2025
• Deribit clients gain access to hundreds of additional assets listed on Coinbase Exchange
• Retail, qualified, and institutional clients can use the upgraded spot product; derivatives access stays limited to qualified and institutional investors

The upgrade is one of the clearest signs yet that Coinbase's acquisition of Deribit is moving from a corporate transaction into shared infrastructure. Coinbase itself has been navigating a mixed run lately, with revenue missing estimates last quarter even as its market share grew, and folding Deribit's order flow into its own orderbook gives the exchange another source of volume without needing new customer acquisition. Dubai's VARA has also been drawing other institutional players into its regulatory perimeter: Nomura's Laser Digital recently backed an onchain private credit push in the UAE, part of a broader pattern of global institutions treating Dubai's licensing regime as a credible base for regulated crypto products rather than a workaround. For Deribit specifically, the structural shift also means its spot depth is now effectively a function of how liquid Coinbase Exchange is, rather than a standalone orderbook Deribit had to build and maintain on its own — a trade-off that favors deeper markets for clients over Deribit's independence as an execution venue in its own right.

None of this should be read as personalized investment advice.