Oman Central Bank official announces CBDC project

Oman Central Bank official announces CBDC project

The Executive President of the Central Bank of Oman, Mr. Tahir Salim Al Amri, commented during the 7t Edition of the new Age Banking Summit on the topic of CBDCs (Central Bank Digital Currencies)

As per a tweet from Oman News Agency stated, “The Central Bank of Oman is working to issue its own CBDC. Many central banks are studying the possibility of issuing their own CBDCs and the Central Bank of Oman is committed to supporting innovation in the financial sector.”

He also mentioned that work was underway to open banking API services and overcoming challenges that face the digitization sector, and stressed the importance of cyber security.

In April 2022, Oman Capital Market Authority announced that it would incorporate real estate tokenization within its virtual assets regulation as well as license crypto exchanges. The Oman virtual asset regulation will be finalized by Q3 of 2022.

Kemal Rizadi, Advisor at the Oman Capital Market Authority made these comments during the Real Estate Exhibition and Conference held in Muscat Oman. As per the comments, real estate tokenization is an option being considered in the proposed virtual asset regulatory framework under process within CMA.

Earlier this year in January 2022 The Oman capital markets Authority announced a tender for specialized companies to assist in setting up a legislative and regulatory framework for virtual assets and licensing supervision and regulations of Virtual assets service providers within the Sultanate of Oman.

Finally it also seems that Oman is indirectly starting to enter the crypto mining sector. Oman’s sovereign wealth fund took an equity stake in a U.S. firm which helps fossil-fuel producers cut flaring by using stranded natural gas to power cryptocurrency mining instead.

Oman Investment Authority was part of the $350 million equity round that Crusoe Energy Systems Inc. raised in April, 2022 according to a statement.

US based Crusoe is opening an office in Oman to deploy power generators and mining equipment for capturing gas at well sites. These statements were made by CEO of Crusoe Chase Lochmiller. It is known that MENA accounts for about 38 percent of the world’s gas flaring.

In UAE, 3D Printing Beats crypto as the tech that could become the most widespread, good and invested in

In UAE, 3D Printing Beats crypto as the tech that could become the most widespread, good and invested in

The recent YouGov Survey in the UAE on the opinions of UAE residents about 16 emerging technologies had some very interesting findings. The survey highlighted the responses of those surveyed on their opinions about the future and impact of these technologies on society. Interestingly awareness about a technology did not necessarily correlate with acceptance or feeling this technology was important or should be invested in.

So while crypto took top spot in terms of awareness, it didn’t continue to take the lead when it came to which technologies would become widespread or which technologies are good or which technologies should governments invest in.

Cryptocurrency as a term topped the list of technologies that UAE residents have heard about. 50 percent of the 1005 residents surveyed have heard a lot about crypto, 36 percent have heard about it a little and only 14 percent have not heard about it at all. This of course is not surprising given all the recent endeavors the UAE government has taken when it comes towards crypto, virtual assets and blockchain. The most recent of which is the inauguration of VARA (Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority) out of Dubai World trade center.

Following cryptocurrency came virtual reality, self-driving cars, 3D Printing, and AI ( Artificial Intelligence),  between 43-47 percent having heard a lot about them.

Interestingly Blockchain came up just after AI with a total of 70 percent having heard of it a lot and a little.

The terms metaverse and even NFTs, came in after with only 29 percent and 27 percent having heard about them a lot. This shows that while UAE was positioned as a leader in terms of NFT purchases in 2021, it seems only a small portion of the population were aware and experimenting with NFTs.

The least technology that UAE respondents are aware of is Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAO) with only 15 percent of respondents hearing a lot about them.

When residents were asked which technologies they believe would eventually become widespread, the list changed. Cryptocurrency dropped to 4th place. The top technology respondents felt would become widespread was 3D Printing, Self Driving cars and Artificial Intelligence. Blockchain and metaverse came in 6th and 7th place respectively. While NFTs and DAOs came in 9th and 10th place.

In terms of which technologies would be good for society once again the list changed. 83 percent noted that 3D printing would bring the most good to society, followed by 66 percent who thought AI would be good. Once again cryptocurrency at 5th place and blockchain at 7th, and metaverse and NFTs came in 11th and 12th place. This could illustrate the need for more education and information on the metaverse and NFTs. Most discussion on NFTs has been about art, videos, while not much has been discussed on NFTs in real estate, healthcare, and financial sector.

Finally when asked where should government invest in, once again 3D Printing took first place with over 52 percent believing it was very important, followed by AI at 52% , self-driving cars, at 46%, virtual reality at 40%, artificial organs and cryptocurrency both at 38% followed closely by Blockchain at 37%

Abu Dhabi UAE now has a crypto vending machine a first in the UAE

Abu Dhabi UAE now has a crypto vending machine a first in the UAE

The Abu Dhabi Global Market has launched a crypto vending machine in the free zone area. Users can insert cash or credit card and exchange them for Bitcoin or other crypto currencies. Located in the Galleria Mall, on Al Maryah Island next to ADGM. 

As per an article in the National, ADGM stated, ” the Kiosk withdrawal is logged via the internet and the puchsed Bitcoins are added to the customer’s virtual currency wallet for use in future transactions.” 

The crypto Kiosk or vending machine is an initiative of World Credit savings a brokerage firm regulated by the FSRA ( Financial Services Regulatory Authority) at ADGM. 

This is a big thing given that the last Crypto ATM set up in Dubai was decommissioned in 2019. It was a Bitcoin ATM in the Rixos Premium hotel. 

In 2019 there was  only one Bitcoin ATM in existence in the GCC in Bahrain.  In a Linkedin Post shared by the CEO of Bahrain Fintech bay Khalid Saad states, ” We have the only live Crypto ATM in the MENA region in Bahrain Fintech Bay. The Crypto ATM is run by Basket and backed by Kuwait entrepreneur Jamal Al Mutawa.” He adds, ” Basket is currently testing their solution under the Central Bank of Bahrain’s regulatory sandbox. this is a great addition to Bahrain’s growing crypto ecosystem.” Later on nothing came out of it. 

Binance enables Dubai Hotel with crypto payment gateway

Binance enables Dubai Hotel with crypto payment gateway

In a recent article Binance announced that it had enabled a Dubai Hotel to offer crypto payment facilities. The hotel in question is the Manor by JA resorts located in Al Furjan. As per the article the The Manor hotel is settling payments in BNB (Binance coin), Bitcoin and Ethereum through Binance crypto to crypto payment gateway.

As per Mohammed Hanif Al Qassim, Managing Partner of The Manor Hotel, “Virtual assets go in line with The Manor’s vision for sustainability and digital transformation, considering its position among top eco-friendly boutique hotels in Dubai.”

Richard Teng, Regional Head of MENA at the crypto-platform, “Binance has been actively engaging established local businesses and institutions to further increase the adoption of crypto for our users and the crypto community as a whole. Our partnerships with leading, innovative businesses, such as JA are in line with our vision to enhance crypto adoption across the region.”

Prior to this Property developers and Hotel managers such as DAMAC also announced they would be accepting crypto payments. UAE DAMAC Properties is accepting crypto payments either Bitcoin or Ethereum.

Even UAE Property firm Your place partnered with Utrust, a cryptocurrency payment solution designed to modernize the finance and payments industry offers clients the ability to pay for properties in Dubai UAE using cryptocurrencies.

UAE Minister of AI and Digital Economy looks at converging Metaverse, Blockchain, and AI

UAE Minister of AI and Digital Economy looks at converging Metaverse, Blockchain, and AI

During the World Economic Forum in Davos, CoinDesk carried out an interview with UAE Minister Omar Sultan AlOlama, Minister of State for Artificial Intelligence, Digital Economy and Remote Work.

Some big takeaways from his interview that I found interesting were the following. First he noted that he was pleased to see more and more governments embracing crypto and finding use cases for it. He also noted that Blockchain had become more popular and as he stated, “This is good for everyone because you can build a more trust based society that will take us into Web3.0”

He also made a comment that while most governments just talk about AI (Artificial Intelligence), the UAE is actually walking the talk. He states, “The UAE is taking a proactive role to regulate and deploy AI in environments and is working to attract AI startups.” He believes given the diversity in UAE demographics AI systems developed in UAE will be less biased towards specific ethnicities, genders, etc.. He also states that the UAE with its cutting edge infrastructure and its diverse economic sectors has a volume of data that could create a globally first AI Company from UAE.

According to Olama, the digital economics will be enabled by AI and Blockchain.

When asked if UAE was seeking to become a crypto hub, he stated that it was already a crypto hub in the region and one of the few leading crypto hubs globally. He noted, “ We need to do what people want and for some reasons people have chosen to embark on a crypto journey, some have invested their life savings in crypto. Today crypto is high risk but eventually it will mature, so as governments we either take a back seat or we become leaders. We need to ensure there is no money laundering, no pump and dump trading schemes. Yet given that this market is nascent there will be mistakes and we need to inform public as much as possible to the risks, ensure no illegal activity is happening.”

Olama believes that the biggest aim is to attract crypto talent which is among the best globally because they are building and securing Web3, building metaverse, payment gateways, and other solutions. UAE wants to enable them and create the right environment for them. He notes how both Polygon Blockchain and Binance crypto exchange have relocated to UAE.

He believes that the regulatory environment in UAE, is one where the regulator views companies and entities as innocent until proven guilty, ensuring the right checks and balances while being agile and nimble.

In his final remark, he notes that at Davos, ” I am  interested in seeing how the metaverse converges with Blockchain and AI and how this will look and use that to launch the right strategies and programs back in the UAE.”

WadZPay Blockchain payments provider to list on UAE Crypto Exchange soon

WadZPay Blockchain payments provider to list on UAE Crypto Exchange soon

WadzPay will list its token on a Middle East crypto asset Exchange soon, according to its Group CEO. In a tweet WadzPay CEO Anish Jain states “We will also expand presence to regional exchanges in UAE, India, Africa and South America.”

The WadzPay ecosystem provides infrastructure for emerging CBDC and Stable coin technologies allowing governments and institutions to sandbox or commercialize programs both at a domestic or international level.

WadzPay is building an interoperable and agnostic blockchain-based payments ecosystem. The company was founded in 2018 in Singapore and is currently operating in South East Asia, South Asia, Middle East and Africa. As per their website the company saw the potential for CBDC and Digital Assets leading the next revolution in the payments industry: by enabling faster payments, improvements in security, cost efficiency with optionality.

They claim to be working with large international payment companies, banks and other large global companies to enable digital asset-based transaction processing and settlement. WadzPay is currently present in Dubai UAE.

WadzPay recently took part in Commercial Bank of Dubai’s Innovation Challenge at DIFC FinTech Hive. Where they presented their digital wallet solution and were shortlisted in the Top 10 Companies, from a field of 100. In the final round WadzPay together with Commercial Bank of Dubai’s team will Pitch their solution to  their Executive Council.

BSV Blockchain to return Blockchain to Satoshi’s vision across MENA and the globe

BSV Blockchain to return Blockchain to Satoshi’s vision across MENA and the globe

BSV Global Blockchain Convention which commenced today in Dubai UAE is aiming to bring Blockchain back to Satoshi’s true vision and make it useful efficient and good.

Jimmy Nguyen, Founding President of BSV Blockchain, told attendees in his opening speech, “In the world today we are seeing too many coins, more than 10,000 cryptocurrencies listed on CoinMarket. We are seeing algorithmic stablecoins crash like in the case of Luna from Terra, with many of these coins being connected to crime. This is not the world I entered into when I started in Blockchain. Today we are here to start a conversation around building a world of Blockchain that is better. Build a world where Satoshi’s vision for BSV original protocol, one of P2P electronic payment transactions, and a data blockchain infrastructure useful for everyone. We are here to make the blockchain useful again.”

He goes on to state that the Satoshi vision was one of efficiency, honesty, a world of good. Bitcoin was created to address problems and issue a powerful data code and develop the internet protocol where it natively would send payments between devices without an intermediary.

Satoshi didn’t call this a blockchain, he called it a distributed time stamp server publishing transactions time stamped in a distributed manner.

Nguyen notes that BSV has demolished prior assumptions and hit 20 million transactions in April 2022, with blocks of 4GB of data. BSV is also the only blockchain that has the capacity to store NFTs on chain and yet he states this remains unmentioned unrecognized by others.

Nguyen believes that Blockchain and crypto should become more than speculative investing. He adds the world of scaling is currently not happening on Bitcoin because it is not being used for daily payments as this would create network congestion given that Bitcoin platform can only carry out 3-7 transactions per second, which is nowhere near the capacity of Visa or MasterCard that can carry out 50,000 transactions per second.

He explains, “At BSV Blockchain we have demonstrated 100,000 transactions per second, we have scaled and our network capacity is 4 GB per block which is 4000 times more than the capacity of the Bitcoin network. In April we demonstrated 2.4 million individual Bitcoin transactions in a single Block and this was Satoshi’s original design for Bitcoin. This is why Satoshi develop OP_PUSHDATA4, allowing users to send gigabytes of data in a transaction working to push to 4.3 GB of data in a single Bitcoin transaction.”

Scaling the blockchain is necessary to make it useful and inexpensive. The BTC network according to Nguyen is congested and transaction costs are high and unreliable, anywhere between 70 cents to 30 USD. Ethereum is not that better with average costs ranging from 3 USD to 70 USD and currently standing at 24 USD. This means minting an NFT on Ethereum costs 80 USD. On BSV it costs 1/100th to 1/20th of a cent, almost free. The goal is to get that number down to 1/1,000th of a cent  This is the way Satoshi had designed it adds Nguyen.

He explains, “Satoshi wanted people to be able to send small casual transactions over the internet, and that is why we are working with IPV6 internet protocol. The combination will create something formidable.”

In the MENA region BSV has already started its journey. Muhammad Salman Anjum Head of BSV Hub for MENA & South Asia stated, “We have launched our BSV MENA hub out of Dubai UAE and are developing partnerships with academia, governmental entities, the private sector, developers as well as regulators to push forward the adoption of Blockchain and BSV.”

BSV is working with several entities in the UAE including the Ministry of Energy, University of Sharjah, and UAE Department of Community, Dubai Police and others to build the research and development as well as knowledge base.

BSV MENA will also be promoting the launch of Women ambassadors in the upcoming months to encourage more women to enter the blockchain ecosystem.

While Ahmed Yousif, Lead of Government Initiative Middle East BSV Blockchain discussed the work BSV is doing with governments in MENA and how this relates to Smart Cities.

As he stated, “The MENA governments have a huge interest in use cases where blockchain can solve problems and the BSV task force is working with governments in KSA on Blockchain use cases for smart cities and Saudi green initiative. Bahrain government is also working on use cases in government on the infrastructure side.”

He gives an example of a use case in KSA where a Saudi diplomatic gated community, will be utilizing NFTs ( Non Fungible Tokens) in Riyadh KSA to encourage its residents to participate in green initiatives as part of the community.

He notes that the BSV journey in the region is just starting but BSV is here to disrupt the way we share data.

Qatar opens its doors to CoinMENA Crypto exchange as a regulated exchange

Qatar opens its doors to CoinMENA Crypto exchange as a regulated exchange

CoinMENA Chief Operating Officer Dina Semaan announced today on twitter that CoinMENA crypto exchange is now serving clients in Qatar. This would be the first crypto exchange to officially announce that it is serving clients in Qatar. As per her tweet, “Starting from today, CoinMENA services are now being offered in Qatar, making us the first regulated crypto exchange to be offering services in Qatar.” She adds with this expansion we now offer CoinMENA services in six Arab countries, and we continue to achieve our goals of offering the simplest and easiest method for trading crypto.” This comes after Qatar’s FIFA 2022 took on sponsors such as Crypto.com, one of the international crypto exchanges globally. It also comes after FIFA signed up AlGorand Blockchain as a sponsor and partner for their digitization plans in the sports and entertainment sector. CoinMENA was first regulated in Bahrain, and then sought regulation in UAE, and offers its services in KSA, Kuwait, Oman, and now Qatar as a regulated entity. In the press release CoinMENA confirms that it has become the first regional digital assets exchange to offer its services in Qatar, meaning that users across the Gulf state can now easily and safely invest in cryptocurrencies for the first time. Qatari citizens and residents can open accounts with CoinMENA and have access to all the features the platform has to offer, including connecting their bank accounts to their CoinMENA wallets, enabling them to deposit and withdraw funds directly and safely within minutes. Commenting in a joint statement, CoinMENA Co-Founders Dina Sam’an and Talal Tabbaa said: “We are delighted to become the first crypto exchange to offer our services in Qatar. Investors have been asking about our plans to enter the country for some time now, so this news represents a major milestone on our long-term geographic market expansion plans.” The Bahrain-headquartered firm recently became the first onshore licensed crypto exchange to introduce limit trading, enabling the CoinMENA users to set the price at which they wish to buy and sell crypto. Users in Qatar will also be able to utilize the recently added features including withdrawing USDT via the TRON network for lower fees, and earning bonus rewards when they invite their friends through CoinMENA’s referral program. “CoinMENA’s entry into Qatar is a huge step on our journey to becoming the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region’s preferred crypto financial services company,” said Sam’an. “Our team is constantly striving to onboard new countries and introduces new features to a wider audience.” “We are immensely proud of everything we have achieved during our first year of operations,” Tabbaa added. “However, we still have a lot to achieve, which is why we will continue to work tirelessly to deliver the best possible experience for our ever-expanding user base.”

Saudi Arabian’s traded 20 billion USD worth of virtual assets in 2021

Saudi Arabian’s traded 20 billion USD worth of virtual assets in 2021

800,000 Saudi’s used digital currencies in 2021 with the value of virtual asset transactions in Saudi at around 20 billion USD and this is expected to grow five times over the next five years. The information was shared by Ali AlObaid, Managing Director of BitOasis crypto exchange, to Arab News

In the article he states, “We believe that this can grow by five times over the next five years. Last year, KSA probably represented 15 percent of Gulf Cooperation Council and Middle East and North Africa activity.”

He added that around 4 percent of adult population in MENA will have invested in crypto by the end of 2022. While in the USA 20 percent of adults have invested in crypto.

BitOasis user base in KSA is primarily millennials, 25-34 year old’s, with 30 percent of those trading on BitOasis between the ages of 35-44 years.

In a YouGov survey recently it noted that 1.8 percent of Saudi Arabian residents currently trade in cryptocurrencies. Yet it is Morocco that tops crypto ownership as per a TripleA report, followed by Egypt, UAE, and then KSA.

The report noted that in 2021 3.9 percent or 300 million people were crypto users globally with 18,000 businesses accepting crypto payments.

Investing in Properties in Lebanon now through Fractional NFTs

Investing in Properties in Lebanon now through Fractional NFTs

Three villas in Lebanon can now be bought using fractional NFTs ( Non Fungible Tokens). Utilizing Aqarchain which is the first crowdfunding fractional NFT investment platform for properties globally, investors of all income levels can own a piece of property in Lebanon and make a return on investment by receiving dividends from rent and sales.

Aqarchain.io has listed Villa Ekolu valued at 640,000 USD divided into 3,746 shares and so far 10.73 percent has been subscribed to it. Aqarchain is offering 7 percent guaranteed Return on Investment.

There are two other villas as well Villa Ekahi valued at 525,000 USD and Villa Hauoli valued at 415,000 USD.

This is the first time property in Lebanon has been tokenized as NFTs and listed.

Aqarchain,  a blockchain powered real estate asset tokenization platform, which aims to create a decentralized ecosystem where investment in real estate is as easy as investing in shares on the stock market, has now launched a NFT marketplace.

Aqarchain mints real estate NFT and fractionalizes it. The company has developed the world’s First Decentralized Real Estate NFT marketplace with a MetaVerse.