- MENA on-chain volume has tripled to $350 billion since 2022.
- Turkey handles close to half the region’s total, while Saudi Arabia grows fastest at 154%.
- Gulf states run crypto as sovereign infrastructure; Turkey and North Africa use it to escape currency collapse.
- Stablecoins now match or beat Bitcoin across most of the region.
Annual on-chain transaction volume across the Middle East and North Africa has reached $350 billion, according to data compiled by the Bitcoin Policy Institute, more than three times the roughly $100 billion the region recorded in 2022. Saudi Arabia posted the sharpest jump, with crypto transactions up 154% year over year, while Turkey still moves more raw value than any other market in the region. The numbers describe a set of economies that have stopped experimenting with digital assets and started depending on them, for reasons that differ sharply from one country to the next.
Turkey moves the most money, Saudi Arabia moves it fastest
Turkey commands close to $200 billion in yearly volume, more than half of everything the region processes. That position has little to do with speculation. The lira has lost value for years, and households treat crypto rails as a way to hold something steadier than their own currency. Saudi Arabia and Qatar sit at the other end of the story, growing 154% and 120% respectively off a much smaller base. The Middle East now counts more than 34.8 million active crypto users, and stablecoins already carry between 45% and 52% of all activity, pulling ahead of Bitcoin in several markets.
Why the Gulf treats tokens as state infrastructure
In the wealthy Gulf Cooperation Council states, crypto is not a retail hobby that regulators tolerate. Governments are wiring it into the machinery of public finance. Saudi Arabia’s activity runs through corporate mandates and tokenization projects tied to Vision 2030, even though the kingdom has not finalized formal retail trading rules. The UAE went further and rebuilt its federal rulebook outright. On January 1, 2026, Federal Decree-Laws 32 and 33 of 2025 replaced the Securities and Commodities Authority with a new federal regulator, the Capital Market Authority, giving it wider powers and pulling virtual assets directly under federal capital-markets law, on top of the existing free-zone regulators like Dubai’s VARA and Abu Dhabi’s ADGM.
That structure has started attracting institutions that normally keep their distance. Standard Chartered launched institutional spot trading for Bitcoin and Ether out of its Dubai International Financial Centre branch, becoming the first globally systemic bank to offer client-facing crypto spot trading in the region. Zand Bank secured central bank approval to issue a regulated, multichain stablecoin backed by the dirham, which turns the national currency into something programmable. Ras Al Khaimah opened RAK DAO, described as the first free zone built solely for digital-asset, Web3 and decentralized-AI firms. Across the Gulf, governments are piloting central bank digital currencies and cross-border payment bridges with BRICS partners rather than waiting for private markets to lead.
Why Turkish and Egyptian households can’t afford to hold cash
Outside the Gulf, the driver is defensive. Years of currency depreciation in Turkey and Egypt pushed ordinary people toward digital assets as a way to protect purchasing power, and most of them are not chasing volatile altcoins. They hold USDT and Bitcoin as practical savings. The Bitcoin Policy Institute frames this as a resilience story. Where sanctions, conflict or currency instability hit hardest, crypto has become a way to preserve wealth and move value outside the traditional financial system. The institute points to the June 2025 regional conflict, when local stock exchanges closed while crypto markets kept trading, as evidence of that operational continuity.
The 93% signal behind Saudi Arabia’s numbers
The composition of Saudi volume explains why the kingdom’s growth looks nothing like a retail boom. Transfers above $10,000 account for 93% of all transaction volume, which points at institutions rather than day-traders. Goldman Sachs and Rothschild are building tokenization pipelines inside the kingdom, moving bonds, trade-finance instruments and corporate real estate on-chain to speed up settlement. The Saudi Central Bank is linking domestic lenders to regional counterparties through blockchain-based settlement. Large enterprises hold roughly 70% of the Saudi blockchain market, concentrated in oil and gas, banking and telecoms, and industry estimates put the cost and reconciliation savings from these deployments at up to 40%. Retail memecoins and unregulated altcoins have no room in this model, and the authorities intend to keep it that way.
Two models, two very different markets ahead
The split running through MENA is starting to produce two kinds of crypto economy that will not converge soon. The UAE is building consumer on-ramps, letting residents settle government fees, buy property and vehicles, and book travel with local airlines using stablecoins. Saudi Arabia and Qatar are doing close to the opposite, keeping retail speculation out while tokenizing their own balance sheets to raise productivity and transparency. Part of the Gulf’s momentum comes from money arriving from abroad: Bitcoin Policy Institute data ties a large slice of the UAE’s transaction base to wealthy migrants who moved in over the past year and brought hundreds of billions of dollars of private capital looking for regulatory protection. Research firms project the Saudi digital-asset market alone to pass $47.8 billion by 2034, a figure presented as an estimate rather than a guarantee. Where the next wave of licensing, custody and settlement infrastructure lands will depend on which of these two models a given jurisdiction decides to copy.