While the World Debated Crypto, the UAE Was Building the Future of Payments W

Last year, while the financial press was busy writing obituaries for crypto and Bitcoin was sliding off front pages, something genuinely significant happened in global payments. Stablecoins processed $33 trillion in transactions, more than Visa and Mastercard combined, which together handled $25.5 trillion. That is not a rounding error. That is a structural shift in how money moves around the world, and it happened with almost no mainstream commentary.

By Raj Kamal

I have spent the better part of two decades in payments. I have watched the industry move from cash to card, from card to mobile wallets, from domestic rails to real-time systems. And I can say with some confidence that what happened quietly in 2025 belongs in the same conversation as those transitions. The difference is that this one was mostly invisible to the people who usually lead that conversation.

The Numbers Deserve Context

Before we get too far, there is a legitimate caveat worth addressing upfront. Not all of that $33 trillion represents the kind of payment activity you might imagine, a supplier invoice settled in Dubai, a remittance sent from a worker in Sharjah to a family in Karachi. A McKinsey and Artemis Analytics report from early 2026 stripped out trading activity, DeFi cycling, and internal fund shuffling and found roughly $390 billion in what they called “genuine end-user payments.” That figure, they noted, more than doubled from 2024.

So the honest version of the story is this: even on the most conservative read, genuine stablecoin payment activity doubled in a single year. And on the broader rails measure, stablecoins have now outscaled the world’s two largest card networks. Both of those things are true simultaneously. The volume growth is also not speculative froth. It is coming from businesses.

An EY-Parthenon survey of 350 corporate and financial institution executives found that 62% of current stablecoin users are using them specifically to pay suppliers. Ship brokers. Steel traders. Import-export businesses. These are treasury teams who found a faster, cheaper way to move money across borders and adopted it without waiting for permission from the mainstream financial narrative.

Why It Happened Quietly

Part of the answer is timing. The growth of stablecoin payment infrastructure coincided almost perfectly with a period of intense negative sentiment around cryptocurrency broadly. Bitcoin volatility, exchange collapses, regulatory battles in the United States, all of it generated enormous noise. Underneath that noise, a parallel financial infrastructure was being quietly assembled.

The other part of the answer is that stablecoins solved problems that the payments industry had been struggling with for years. Cross-border payments through correspondent banking networks are slow, opaque, and expensive. A typical international B2B transfer can take two to three days and lose 3-6% to fees and foreign exchange costs. Stablecoins settle in seconds, operate 24/7, and carry transaction costs that are a fraction of the traditional alternative. When you frame it that way, the adoption curve makes complete sense.

The incumbents noticed. Stripe acquired stablecoin infrastructure provider Bridge for $1.1 billion and launched stablecoin payment acceptance across more than 100 countries. Mastercard acquired BVNK, a stablecoin infrastructure firm, in March 2026. Visa settled $4.5 billion annually in stablecoins as of January 2026 and is integrating USDC into its core settlement operations. These companies are not making billion-dollar bets on a trend they expect to reverse.

The UAE Is Not Playing Catch-Up

This is where it gets specifically relevant for this region, and where I would push back on anyone who assumes the Middle East is watching from a distance.
The UAE has spent the last two years building regulated stablecoin infrastructure with a seriousness that few jurisdictions globally can match. The Central Bank of the UAE issued its Payment Token Services Regulation in mid-2024, establishing a comprehensive framework requiring 100% reserve backing for payment tokens and creating clear licensing pathways. This is not a sandbox experiment. It is a formal financial regulatory structure.

In October 2024, AE Coin became the first fully licensed AED-pegged stablecoin, issued through a partnership with Al Maryah Community Bank. In January 2026, the CBUAE registered USDU, the country’s first USD-backed stablecoin, with reserves held onshore at Emirates NBD, Mashreq, and Mbank. In December 2025, ADNOC Distribution signed an agreement to accept AE Coin across nearly 980 service stations across the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt. That is one of the largest retail deployments of a regulated payment token anywhere in the world.

At the same time, the UAE’s domestic payment systems processed more than AED 20 trillion in transfers in just the first ten months of 2025. The country is consistently among the world’s largest sources of outbound remittances, with a workforce that sends money to families across South Asia, Southeast Asia, and East Africa every month. The friction in that system is exactly what stablecoin rails are designed to remove.

What Payments Veterans Should Take From This

I am not suggesting that traditional payment rails are disappearing. Visa and Mastercard are actively integrating stablecoins rather than being displaced by them, which is itself a significant signal about where the industry is heading. The more important observation is about infrastructure decisions being made right now, in this decade, that will determine which payment corridors are competitive in the next one.

The UAE’s approach, regulated frameworks, onshore reserve requirements, licensed issuers, interoperability with the Digital Dirham, is a serious attempt to capture a structural moment rather than react to it. Stablecoin transactions by value are projected to exceed $50 trillion in transaction volume in 2026 alone. Five to ten percent of cross-border payments globally are expected to run on stablecoin rails by the end of the decade.

The shift happened while people were arguing about whether crypto was real.

About the Author:
Raj Kamal is Founder and CEO of TransFi, a cross-border payments and stablecoin settlement infrastructure company that has processed over $1 billion in payment volume across Asia, MENA, Africa, and Latin America.