GS ml o ablal lBBuussi ni neessssAAwwaar dr dss22002236| |1 11 1 Dubai launched VARA, the world’s first dedicated virtual assets regulator, in March 2022, weeks before Terra collapsed and months before FTX. It looked like terrible timing. Irina stated: “It was the best thing that could have happened. VARA wrote its rulebook while watching every failure mode play out live.” The UAE kept building: VARA in Dubai, the FSRA in Abu Dhabi Global Market, the DFSA in the DIFC, the Central Bank for stablecoins and, from January 2026, the federal Capital Market Authority with a dedicated federal virtual assets regime. Ask what the UAE got most right, and Irina doesn’t name a token. She names a land registry. Since 2025, Dubai Land Department title deeds for tokenized property have recorded the owner as “Tokenholder”, linked to a digital wallet. The pilot drew investors from more than 50 nationalities, and in February 2026 a regulated secondary market opened. In August, CoinDesk published research by Irina and her team tracking every disclosed crypto funding round in the first half of 2026: US$11.2 billion across 377 rounds, with only about 3% going to DeFi. Nearly all the rest went into businesses that need a regulatory licence to operate. Irina expects M&A to follow, with buyers acquiring licences, banking relationships and regulatory history rather than applying from scratch. Her firm tracks the whole market through the NeosLegal UAE VASP Licence Tracker, the first consolidated public database of licences across all five regulators. NeosLegal stands as the UAE’s first crypto-native law firm, now with ten years in operation and decades of combined experience behind it. Its commitment to excellence has helped it to evolve over the years, with Irina and her team remaining ever-devoted to their accolade-worthy craft. Contact: Irina Heaver, Founder Company: NeosLegal Website: https://neoslegal.co/ Irina Heaver remembers when the hardest part of her job was explaining to regulators and institutions what Bitcoin was. “They weren’t hostile. They just didn’t know the risks,” she said. “Nobody had told them what this was, so the safe answer was to ban any Bitcoin or crypto activity. The job wasn’t arguing with regulators. It was explaining the thing to them before anyone else did.” Nearly a decade later, the UAE has five virtual asset regimes, counts 110 licensed entities, and records property ownership against token holders’ wallets. In 2025 alone, transactions through entities licensed by Dubai’s Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority reached nearly US$700 billion. Irina, the UAE crypto lawyer and the founder of NeosLegal, has advised the industry since 2016 and has lived in the UAE since 2008. Irina trained in law in Australia, where she earned a Juris Doctor, she spent 13 years as an international oil and gas lawyer. She negotiated deals across the Middle East, Africa, and Central Asia, including a US$11 billion gas project involving the Government of Turkmenistan, Bank of China and Mubadala. It was unusual training for a crypto lawyer, and she credits it with almost everything about how she works. Irina commented: “When your counterparty is a government, you learn very quickly that they are not trying to stop the deal. They are trying to work out who carries the risk if it goes wrong. Most people in crypto spent years treating regulators as the enemy. I’d spent a career on the other side of that table, treating regulators as business counterparties.” Irina became interested in Bitcoin around 2011. In 2016 she left the corporate world, where she was general counsel at one of the largest shipping groups in the world, and founded NeosLegal. To take the challenge further, she also co-founded a crypto exchange, which taught her what a rulebook looks like once someone has to turn it into banking, custody, staffing and operating procedures. The turning point came in 2018, when Uzbekistan invited her to advise on crypto policy and legislation at a time when almost no government had a framework to copy. “Writing rules is a completely different thing from critiquing them, because every sentence you write, somebody has to work under,” Irina added. She came back reading rulebooks differently. Irina shared: “I stopped seeing a list of requirements. I saw a list of fears. Every provision is there because someone in that building was worried about one specific failure. If you can name the fear, you can answer it.” She has since advised several more governments on virtual asset policy, including the UAE, and worked on establishing a dedicated commercial free zone for Web3 businesses. After spending 13 years negotiating oil and gas deals with governments, Irina Heaver walked away to practice a kind of law that did not yet exist. Fast forward to 2026 where NeosLegal and its dedicated founder have become multi-award-winning entities setting the pace for this evolving industry. Best Crypto & Web3 Law Firm 2026 – UAE & Best Crypto Lawyer 2026 (UAE): Irina Heaver
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTUyMDQwMA==