Multiple licensed dirham-backed stablecoins. A central bank actively building open finance infrastructure. And $1.8 billion in adjusted transaction volume in June alone, up 105% year on year.
MFTA has just published a new report mapping the UAE’s digital assets and stablecoin ecosystem. In this episode of Wall Street to MENA, Raghda Ibraheem sits down with Akos Erzse, UAE Policy Manager at Coinbase and Co-Chair of the MFTA Policy and Regulation Working Group, to break down what the data actually shows.
Topics covered:
- Why the UAE has moved from building regulatory frameworks to using them at commercial scale
- Why the market needs multiple licensed stablecoins, not one, and what “common standards” actually means for reserves and redemption
- How the Central Bank’s open finance infrastructure and stablecoin regulation form two layers of the same strategy
- The $312 million UAE stablecoin market cap, and what institutional transactions like IHC’s on-chain settlement signal about real adoption
- How UAE regulation compares to the rest of the GCC, and where Saudi Arabia’s tokenisation focus differs
- What comes next: multi-framework stablecoins and the convergence of AI and digital assets
MFTA connects regulators, financial institutions, and fintech builders across 22 markets in the MENA region.