This publication talks to a firm about the approach that various Middle East jurisdictions take towards digital assets and cryptocurrencies and where this is heading.

With all the ferment around digital assets – an engrossing and also volatile field at times – a question is where do the Gulf states of the Middle East, such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, fit into to this? This publication's editor is in Dubai this week for WealthBriefing's annual MENA region awards. A few days before, we interviewed Bashir Kazour (main picture), managing director, digital asset custody and tokenisation, for Taurus.

Kazour is based in Dubai in the UAE. Taurus, an organisation with its roots in Switzerland, opened its Dubai office more than two years ago. 

The existence of such business is an example of how ideas about custody are evolving to deal with digital assets – a term applied to cryptocurrencies, tokens and other entities that sit on the blockchain – aka distributed ledger technology. 

WealthBriefing asked Kazour where the Gulf region fits into this picture, for instance on the regulatory side?

“The United Arab Emirates has been quick off the mark to adopt a range of international regulatory standards, as well as pioneering a number of its own,” he said.

Kazour noted that in September 2025, the UAE officially adopted the Crypto-Asset Reporting Framework (CARF) developed by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). This was a major step towards tax transparency and cross-border information sharing in the digital asset industry, he said. The development followed the August 2025 partnership between the Securities and Commodities Authority (SCA) and Dubai’s Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority (VARA), a landmark move towards regulatory harmonisation across the Emirates. The two bodies agreed to a shared supervisory framework for virtual assets, a step that removes regulatory fragmentation and gives institutions the confidence to build within the region.

“Such reforms not only attract foreign investment but also underpin new use cases and markets,” he said. 

“A great example is how Dubai became the first Middle Eastern government backing real estate tokenization at scale. The MENA region’s first licensed real estate platform saw a Dh1.75 million ($480,000) Dubai villa tokenized and sold out in five minutes, to 169 Emirates ID holders from 40 nationalities. The project, fully compliant under VARA, demonstrates how regulatory certainty accelerates adoption,” Kazour continued. 

“That clarity explains why so many global institutions are pivoting towards the Gulf. While Western markets are preoccupied with optimising legacy financial systems, the UAE is building tokenized infrastructure for an on-chain economy and, crucially, writing the regulations to support it,” he said. 

The UAE and other jurisdictions know that they cannot stand still. As explained in this recent London conference, the US, which in the words of one speaker pursued a policy of “malign neglect,” is on a push to significantly liberalise the operation of digital assets/cryptocurrencies business. 

WB asked Kazour what sort of businesses Gulf states are trying to stimulate.

“We see a lot of interest in stablecoins here [in the Gulf]…such as for cross-border payments. That’s one of the most important use cases,” he said. 

Earlier in 2025 Taurus said it was deploying the first private stablecoin contract, a privacy-preserving model that offers confidentiality and selective disclosure to authorised parties, including issuers, regulators, and law enforcement.

“This [contract] enables institutions to meet both operational and compliance needs. Stablecoins can be part of how businesses are `on-ramped’ into other types of digital assets, etc,” he said. “Stablecoins increasingly serve as on-ramps to other types of digital assets, from tokenized treasuries to yield-bearing instruments.”

“Roughly 80 to 90 per cent of stablecoin deployments we see eventually connect into other digital asset ecosystems,” Kazour noted. “Cross-border payments remain the clearest use case, but yield has become the biggest story of 2025.”

He noted some experimentation in the stablecoin field and related areas in countries such as Turkey.

“In Turkey, for example, we’re seeing some banks creating a fintech subsidiary or a digital asset subsidiary, and they are running all the operations from there. 

“So, the really interesting thing is watching how investment and operations are moving around the world, gravitating to territories that have clear, well-thought-out regulations. It’s a great example of how regulations are the ‘seed’ of a snowball that gathers pace and scale in an astonishingly short space of time,” he said. 

This kind of experimentation is mirrored in other regions, including Qatar and Saudi Arabia, which have traditionally taken more conservative stances, he said. 

Kazour said that in Qatar, the Qatar Financial Centre (QFC) launched its Digital Assets Framework 2024, providing legal recognition for tokenization and digital property rights, a complete reversal of the Qatar Central Bank’s 2018 ban on crypto trading.

“What we see is capital and innovation moving towards jurisdictions with regulatory clarity. Once those frameworks take root, the ecosystem scales almost exponentially – regulation becomes the seed that triggers the snowball,” Kazour added.