Renters in the UAE who are long accustomed to writing a stack of post-dated cheques at the start of each lease could be paying landlords in stablecoins in as little as six to nine months, according to Bobby Zhou, co-founder of Aqua Labs Investment.
“All the tools are there,” Mr Zhou said on the sidelines of the Stablecoin and Digital Asset Innovation Forum 2026 at Abu Dhabi Global Market.
Turning to the region’s long-standing rent cheque problem, Mr Zhou said the missing piece is not technology but co-ordination. He said that developers, agents and management companies must “assemble a team and then assemble the tools”.
Mr Zhou, founding partner of Aqua Labs Investment, an entity of Web3-focused investment group Aqua1 Foundation, said this will come sooner than most expect.
“We’re not talking about 2028; we’re talking about 2026,” he told The National, adding that with the right institutions aligned, “we’re talking about six to nine months”.
Mr Zhou was also bullish on commodities trading, an area he said stablecoin settlement has already reached. He called the shift from multi-day Swift transfers to near-instant blockchain settlement, and from fees as high as $25 to a few cents, a straightforward case for adoption.
“Commodity trading with stablecoin settlement for cross-border payment is a no-brainer.” His conservative estimate for widespread use in that sector is 2028, although momentum could bring that forward.
Adoption progression
His comments came the same day that Safeheron, a global provider of digital asset self-custody infrastructure, and UPay.com, a crypto payments and card-issuing platform, signed a preliminary agreement on Wednesday designed to link institutional-grade wallet security with everyday spending tools.
It is a pairing that organisers of the forum said was evidence that stablecoin adoption in the region is accelerating beyond pilots and panels.
“Safeheron is an MPC wallet provider, so we can protect our clients’ assets, so that’s why we signed the [memorandum of understanding]; we can choose referrals with each other,” said Owen Yang, chief executive of UPay, which issues virtual and physical crypto payment cards.
Mr Yang said the agreement will let Safeheron’s wallet clients tap into UPay’s card and settlement network, and vice versa.
Mr Yang said that when the agreement takes effect, cardholders will be able to move seamlessly between digital assets and everyday spending. “You can spend everywhere, and you can do the ATM withdrawal, and you can do the on-ramp, off-ramp easily,” he said. “We support Bitcoin, Ethereum, USDT and also all stablecoins you have.”
One feature is not yet live locally. Direct bank transfers from crypto balances are already available in markets including Europe and Hong Kong, Mr Yang said, but not the UAE, where UPay is still awaiting a licence from regulators. “Once we get the licence, this will be a key feature we’re going to use,” he said.
According to Chainalysis’ latest report, people in the UAE, where growth is concentrated, are leading adopters of the currency in the region. In October 2025, the New York-based consultancy published that the UAE received more than $53 billion in crypto value transactions for the year to June 2025, up 33 per cent on the previous period, making it the second-largest crypto market in the Mena region after Turkey with $200 billion worth of transactions.
It said that while the UAE’s overall crypto activity is increasingly dominated by large institutional transfers, merchant services – meaning real, everyday commercial payments – are growing fastest, specifically with smaller transaction sizes.
Chainalysis called this a “counter-cyclical pattern” at the time, concluding that crypto in the UAE is “transitioning from a primarily speculative or investment vehicle to a practical payment solution with real-world utility for UAE consumers and businesses”.
Almost ready
The deal lands in a market where the regulatory groundwork has been years in the making. The UAE Central Bank began implementing its digital currency strategy in March 2023, and by July 2024 published a dedicated framework governing stablecoins, alongside the frameworks Abu Dhabi Global Market and Dubai’s Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority already had in place for crypto more broadly.
AE Coin, the UAE’s first regulated stablecoin, received final approval in December 2024, and Tether was cleared to develop another locally in August 2025.
UAE regulators say the policies guiding stablecoin use are close to completion. Wai Lum Kwok, Senior Executive Director of Authorisation at the Dubai Financial Services Authority, said that Abu Dhabi’s stablecoin regulatory architecture, introduced about two years ago, is close to finished. Asked to put a number on how complete the framework is, he said: “I would say 99 per cent.”
This implies that “we are one of the first movers [globally]”, and he believes local rules are robust enough that “our framework is ready to be exported to the US”.
The remaining gap, Mr Kwok said, sits with the banking sector rather than the rulebook. Lenders remain cautious about providing on-ramp and off-ramp services to stablecoin issuers, and adoption by traditional banks “is still a long way to go”, he said, pointing to concerns among lenders around financial crime controls and the treatment of digital assets on their balance sheets.
That regulatory groundwork has already produced concrete transactions. Abu Dhabi’s International Holding Company, First Abu Dhabi Bank and Sirius International Holding jointly developed DDSC, a stablecoin pegged 1:1 to the dirham. It received UAE Central Bank approval in February, and in May was used in a Dh110 million transaction, one of the region’s largest single stablecoin settlements. DDSC has processed over Dh150 million ($41 million) in total transactions since its launch.
Earlier this month, DDSC was cleared to operate on platforms regulated by the Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority, opening the token to everyday retail use such as shopping and peer-to-peer transfers, in addition to its earlier institutional role.
AI and stablecoin payments
Artificial intelligence is beginning to reshape payments, with AiPayWithCrypto.com recently launching its Agent Pay Card, a product that lets users authorise an AI agent to handle their day-to-day spending using their identity, chief executive Vincent Tse said.
Human spending habits, at most a few dozen transactions a day, will look increasingly small next to the volume of transactions machines will generate, Mr Tse said at the forum. Future payment demand will be dominated by machine-to-machine transfers happening at far higher frequency than card networks or banking rails can currently support, and such activity will need to run on blockchain rather than traditional settlement systems, he said.
“If the AI cannot take the responsibility, nobody wants to use the AI.” He added that in his view, all AI-driven transactions will ultimately need to be settled on-chain rather than through fiat rails, because “all the transactions based on AI should be based on blockchain technology”.