How Oumla is putting Saudi interbank finance on a private Avalanche L1.

Sharia-compliant markets, modern rails.

An Islamic repo is not a conventional repo. Each transaction is a structured agreement that has to be papered, agreed, and settled between two banks; a process built on bilateral workflows that are slow, manual, and expensive to audit. Oumla, a Saudi infrastructure company that helps governments and enterprises build on blockchain-based infrastructure, set out to give these transactions shared rails: two banks enter a connected portal, a contract factory deploys a smart contract governing the repo, and the agreement executes and settles on the network. The efficiency is the point. The theology of the instrument doesn't change; the plumbing underneath it finally does.

Confidential between banks. Auditable by mandate.

The defining requirement was who gets to see what. Banks on the network must transact without exposing their positions to competitors sitting on the same chain: the amounts, the counterparties, and the bonds or assets backing each deal are all confidential. The regulators, meanwhile, need to see precisely what their mandate entitles them to. The architecture resolves this with encrypted transactions built on Encrypted ERC and zero-knowledge proofs: each party sees its own transactions, no bank sees another's deals, and audit visibility is a designed-in role rather than an afterthought. This is a deliberately governed system, Oumla was explicit that this is not DeFi, and the network's governance stays centralized with the operator and regulators.

Built in the Kingdom.

Saudi government and financial-sector requirements make data residency non-negotiable. AvaCloud deployed the network in Google Cloud's Saudi region, validators, APIs, and explorer infrastructure all in-country. The first Avalanche L1 stood up in the Kingdom, and a deployment pattern now reusable for any Saudi institution with the same constraint. The mainnet went private in July 2025, six months after the first consultation.

A network the banks will help run.

The roadmap decentralizes operations without decentralizing governance: participating banks gain the ability to operate their own validators, on their own premises or in their own cloud, while Oumla continues to run the platform. For institutions accustomed to owning their infrastructure, running a node in the network that settles their trades is not a technical detail. It is the difference between using someone's system and being part of one.