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Jamie Dimon called Bitcoin a "fraud" in 2017, a "pet rock" in 2023, and as recently as January 2025 said it "only serves traffickers and criminals." Then in a stunning u-turn, at the Future Investment Initiative in Riyadh last October, he told the audience that stablecoins are "real" and "will be used by all of us." He's not alone in this conversion.
In late 2024, Stripe acquired Bridge, a stablecoin API platform, for $1.1 billion, then followed up by buying Privy, which builds the wallet infrastructure that lets apps onboard users without forcing them through MetaMask or Coinbase. This week, Mastercard announced it's acquiring BVNK, a London-based firm that helps businesses send, receive, and convert stablecoins across 130 countries, for $1.8 billion, the largest stablecoin deal to date.
BVNK co-founders: Jesse Hemson-Struthers (CEO), Donald Jackson (CTO), and Chris Harmse (CBO)
Doubtless, you'll have heard the incessant chatter about stablecoin utility over the past 18 months or so, whether it be institutional adoption, acquisitions or AI slop pieces regurgitated on LinkedIn expounding its virtues. But the acquisitions tell you something that thought leadership that rings hollow doesn't, institutions are no longer content to watch from the sidelines.
Nkiru Uwaje watched this shift from the inside. Before co-founding MANSA, a Dubai-based stablecoin liquidity provider, she spent seven years at SWIFT, leading ecosystem strategy for the messaging network that underpins most of the world's cross-border payments. She watched the data on remittance flows and saw her colleagues shrug at it. "Who cares about the Global South?" was the institutional posture, even as the numbers made clear that these were the flows growing fastest and serving the people who needed efficient rails most.
What people outside the system don't always grasp about SWIFT is that money doesn't move on it, instructions do. The actual settlement happens elsewhere, slowly, through a tangle of pre-funded accounts, batch processing, and institutional relationships. Money moving from Abu Dhabi to Karachi passes through a chain of originating bank to correspondent bank to correspondent bank to receiving bank, each with its own compliance checks, cutoff times, and fees. The system was genuinely innovative in 1973 but over fifty years later, it exists to serve the banks who own it, not the end users sending money home.
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Stablecoins offer a different architecture. Value moves on distributed networks, settles in minutes, and doesn't require pre-funded accounts in eighteen jurisdictions to function. The core proposition is disarmingly simple, move value without moving currency.
What follows is a deep dive into what's being built to capture that opportunity in MENA. We'll start with a primer on how stablecoins actually work and why Tether dominates emerging markets despite the compliance concerns that haunt it in Washington. We'll walk through the regulatory landscape, where Saudi sits on the verge of a framework that could reshape the kingdom's payments infrastructure overnight, and where 11.3 million Egyptians are using crypto anyway despite an outright legal prohibition.
We'll profile the founders building on top of this: Maher Ayari of Sorbet, a Saudi-focused stablecoin neobank preparing for a market that doesn't technically exist yet, and Nkiru Uwaje of MANSA, whose journey from SWIFT to Tether-backed liquidity provider tells you something about where the talent thinks the opportunity is.
We'll get into the sovereignty question (what does it mean to build on American rails when you're serving markets that have complicated relationships with American power?) and look at why the window for regional players to establish themselves is closing faster than most of them realise.
A stablecoin primer
For readers who've heard the term but have been too embarrassed to admit confusion, a stablecoin is a cryptocurrency designed to maintain a 1:1 peg with a fiat currency, almost always the US dollar. The mechanics are relatively straightforward.
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