The United Arab Emirates, population close to 9.7 million: nearly 3 million people who live there are users, by one estimate around a third of the country’s population has already adopted cryptocurrencies more than any other nation in the world.
But the Gulf nation doesn’t just want to purchase digital currencies — it wants to be a crypto capital.
Aside from announcing one of the world’s most extensive crypto regulatory laws and introducing a dirham-pegged stablecoin this year, the UAE also last week licensed Binance (the world’s biggest crypto exchange) to become the first global firm to offer services within its Abu Dhabi Global Market (ADGM), a special economic region in the Gulf state’s capital.
“Our global users can know that we are a regulated player and we have transparency,” Binance CEO Richard Teng said in an interview with CNN.
The city’s drive on cryptocurrency in recent years has made it “compelling” for companies like Binance, Teng, a former CEO of ADGM’s Financial Services Regulatory Authority, said. “It’s very pro-business,” he said. “The regulators here started to regulate crypto about seven years ago … (it has) the fastest-growing capital markets and fastest-growing financial center in the world. So, it’s a very enabling environment in terms of us being able to help ourselves here.”
🏅 https://t.co/vCNztATkNg has won ‘Best Blockchain-Based Solution’ at the MENA Fintech Awards for our world-first agreement with Dubai Finance to facilitate government service fee payments using digital assets.
This is a pioneering milestone in digital finance and is the first… pic.twitter.com/52jWVMvQ7y
— Crypto.com (@cryptocom) December 11, 2025
The sovereign wealth funds of the UAE, which are believed to have a total asset base valued at around $2tn, are placing big bets on models for decentralized digital finance as they attempt to diversify from fossil fuels in their economies and reduce their dependence on the dollar when it comes to banking and cross-border transactions.
“We have a very active crypto and blockchain ecosystem sprouting up in Dubai and Abu Dhabi,” said Ronit Ghose, head of future of finance at research group Citi Global Insights.
It’s here that digital finance is taking off, with the UAE as its pioneer – though other states in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) are also looking at digitising their finances, particularly blockchain technology and with Bahrain one of the “frontier states” adopting crypto rules, Ghose told CNN at Binance Blockchain Week, a global conference gathering leaders and investors of cryptocurrencies held in Dubai earlier this month.
“You have the leadership of especially the U.A.E and also Saudi, who are forward-leaning, they are relatively young in mindset and soul and they want to bring on board these new technologies,” he said.
It’s not all-Arabian-come-all with crypto in GCC countries: Oman, Qatar and Kuwait have been more reserved; the latter two went as far as banning cryptocurrency and stablecoins.
The crypto market is famously volatile: Bitcoin reached an all-time high of $126,000 a coin on October 6 before plummeting below $81,000 seven weeks later. Veteran crypto critic Peter Schiff, chief global strategist for asset manager Euro Pacific Capital, told CNN that cryptocurrency has “no value outside of speculation” and fears governments’ backing of cryptocurrencies could normalize what he sees as a Ponzi scheme.
That is, use blockchain to tokenize gold, an actual asset that has utility, rather than a cryptoccurency or stablecoin (which are pegged to the value of a real-world currency).
“Gold in the form of tokens would represent physical currency. “They call it digital gold, but they’re not — it’s got nothing in common with gold,” Schiff, who argued with Changpeng Zhao Binance at Binance Blockchain Week over such issues as tokenized gold and stablecoins. And Trump pardoned Zhao this year on money-laundering charges.
