The United Arab Emirates has spent years going all-in on crypto, passing pioneering regulation and attracting tycoons at a time when the U.S. was cracking down on the industry. Now, that bet is paying off. Eric Trump is a featured speaker at Bitcoin MENA, which bills itself as the world’s largest gathering of bitcoiners, today and Tuesday in Abu Dhabi. Also on the stage: Steve Witkoff, Trump's family friend and incoming Middle East envoy, as well as Trump 1.0 alumni Paul Manafort and Anthony Scaramucci. Speaking to CNBC Monday from Abu Dhabi, the son of the president-elect said: “The modern banking system is antiquated. It’s just a matter of time before crypto not only catches up, but just really leaps ahead. And so, we’re incredibly excited on a lot of fronts.” With the value of bitcoin topping $100,000, crypto — born just 15 years ago as an alternative financial system profoundly skeptical of the establishment — now appears on its way to be a tool of the moneyed elite and a kind of glue uniting the new governing classes. Crypto is taking a central role in Donald Trump’s Washington. The president-elect has stocked his transition team with pro-crypto leaders, including Paul Atkins to head the Securities and Exchange Commission, Howard Lutnick for Commerce Secretary and venture capitalist David Sacks as “AI and Crypto Czar”. Crypto “had been off on the side for most of the financial community,” said Joshua Jahani, managing director of the New York-based Jihani & Associates investment bank that has worked with UAE sovereign wealth funds. Now, under Trump, he said, “it’s a whole new world.” “Trump has this weird habit of finding very niche interests and bringing them into large scale focus,” he added. This is the first year the UAE will host the Bitcoin Conference (you might be more familiar with its recent Nashville event, which became a Donald Trump campaign stop). The location in capital city Abu Dhabi is not an accident of fate: the UAE attracted $30 billion in crypto in the year ending in June 2024, according to the group Chainalysis, which recently launched a regional office in Dubai, the most populous city in the country. When the UAE first got into crypto, it was not aiming at Trump, who called crypto “a scam” as late as 2021. Rather, the UAE promoted crypto with regulatory frameworks and financial free zones as part of a broader push into tech. “I think the UAE’s proactive approach [to crypto] probably had more to do with the going from an oil economy to a more diverse economy, and inviting more and more tech investments,” said Arushi Goel, who has tracked the growth of crypto in the region for the blockchain research group Chainalysis. Other regional powerhouses including Saudi Arabia and Qatar are also courting tech investment, and offering low-cost energy for the data centers needed for both crypto and AI. But the UAE stands out for making digital assets a core part of its economic strategy, said Jahani. Its policies made it possible for people to be paid in crypto and send remittances to countries with plunging currencies, like Afghanistan and Lebanon. Jordan Bray, who heads Gulf activities for the Silicon Valley-based Plug and Play venture capital firm, said “there’s been a massive amount of crypto founders” moving to the UAE, primarily because of the ease of doing business. For example, Bray observed favored investors receiving ten-year “Golden visas” within days. “It’s super refreshing,” he said of the government. “They’re very serious.” Crypto is just the latest shared interest between Trump’s family and the UAE, said Gulf expert Dania Thafer, executive director of the D.C.-based Gulf International Forum. The president-elect has long business ties in the region. Those include Jared Kushner’s investment portfolio, funded by the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Qatar; and the Trump International Golf Club in Dubai. In Abu Dhabi, Eric Trump and Witkoff are representing the Trump Organization’s newly launched crypto business, World Liberty Financial Inc. The watchdog group Public Citizen warns the company is selling non-transferrable, locked tokens, making them a “100 percent loss” for investors. Attorney Alex Golubitsky, whose phone number was listed on the company’s SEC filing, said in an email the tokens “may, in the future become transferable.” At least one of the buyers will also be a featured conference speaker: Chinese cryptocurrency entrepreneur Justin Sun, who said on X that he invested $30 million in World Liberty Financial tokens. (He also just bought and ate a $6 million banana taped to a wall). Chainalysis estimated there are more than 20,000 distinct buyers of the WLFI tokens with an average transaction of $2,096. But that is a minor detail to a larger story: Eric Trump appearing in Abu Dhabi shows crypto is moving into the “upper echelon of capital markets,” Jahani said. Abu Dhabi is the world’s richest city in sovereign wealth funds, with $1.7 trillion in assets as of October 2024, according to the group Global SWF. Jahani predicted Trump’s newfound friendliness to crypto stood to open the investment floodgates. “Crypto has graduated,” he said, from “the fringe computer nerds who started this.” When bitcoin began, “you had to know how to mine it, you had to have a wallet. Now you have essentially the most powerful man in the world supporting it, along with the most sophisticated institutional investors in the world, the sovereigns in Abu Dhabi … Who’s bigger than that? Nobody.”
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