Dubai’s crypto party is bigger than ever

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — On a humid Dubai night in early May, I joined guests gathered on the five-storey, 220-foot long Lotus megayacht to celebrate the culmination of TOKEN2049, a major crypto conference held in the glitzy desert emirate I call home. 

The party was hosted by DogeOS, the app developer behind the blockchain for Dogecoin, the shiba inu-faced meme coin that saw a rip-roaring rally in 2021 and briefly turned a few bullish buyers into millionaires. 

It’s part of a long string of high-profile UAE-based industry events and feels like a prescient symbol of the ever-growing exuberance around cryptocurrencies in the Middle East — and globally — right now.

The attendees around me spanned a colorful mix; crypto investors and startup founders, programmers, influencers – and those who, after half an hour of conversation, still wouldn’t really explain what they do.   

“You’ve probably heard of me. Elon retweets me a lot,” one guest said as he introduced himself. I later heard him say the exact same line to three other people. 

One pair of female attendees promoted their Dubai-based startup that designs business plans for corporates and entrepreneurs “by calculating their astrology and birth chart numerology.” They told me that “millionaires often look down on this science … but billionaires love it.” 

The guests hailed from all over the world, sharing a common passion for the future of decentralized digital currency and the revolutionizing of finance. A microcosm of Dubai itself, the boat was a melting pot of nationalities and characters. 

One American passenger wearing a cowboy hat and a ninja turtle backpack hawked a meme token featuring a shiba inu in a cowboy hat called $WIT coin, standing for “what in tarnation.” Between shots of tequila he discussed collaboration with crypto enthusiasts who’d flown in from China. 

The guestlist also featured Olaf Carlson-Wee, the bleach-blonde original “bubble boy” of crypto, who was Coinbase’s first employee and later founded Polychain Capital, one of the world’s largest crypto hedge funds. Carlson-Wee, whose net worth is estimated to be in the hundreds of millions, said he is frequently flown in from Los Angeles to work with the UAE government. 

The bullish energy of the yacht party — complete with open bars, teppanyaki grills and Vegas-style belly dancers wearing feather headdresses — matched the unbridled optimism currently pulsing through the global crypto community.

Posts of “WE’RE SO BACK” have abounded on social media in the months following U.S. President Donald Trump’s return to the White House and his pledge to make America the “crypto capital of the world.” 

His son Eric Trump, executive vice president of the Trump Organization and board member of Trump-family-owned crypto platform World Liberty Financial, was a keynote speaker at Dubai’s Token2049. He was joined by Zack Witkoff, World Liberty Financial’s co-founder, and the son of Steve Witkoff, the Trump administration’s Middle East envoy.

“Smart people, low taxes … and the willingness to actually look forward and realize that the modern financial system is broken” is part of what makes the UAE so attractive for cryptocurrency enthusiasts like himself, the younger Trump told CNBC during the conference.  

Speaking onstage at the event on May 1, Eric Trump also announced that the Trump family’s World Liberty Financial would provide the stablecoins for Abu Dhabi state-backed investment firm MGX’s mammoth $2 billion investment into Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange.

“We thank MGX and Binance for their trust in us,” Zack Witkoff told the audience. “It’s only the beginning.”

Jordan Jefferson, CEO of MyDoge, the team behind DogeOS, moved from Canada to Dubai in 2022 in search of a more crypto-friendly regulatory environment. At a time when North America was cracking down on the industry, he said the UAE was “embracing it and leading regulation.”

“I came out here because it was at the forefront of the industry. And everybody was here – the energy was amazing,” he told CNBC at the yacht party. Jefferson and his colleagues had donned shirts emblazoned with a picture of the Doge shiba inu wearing an Emirati headdress, the kandura, which they dubbed “Habibi Doge.”

Major crypto exchanges like Binance, Crypto.com, OKX, Bybit, and Kraken have received approvals or provisional licenses to operate in the UAE, with many choosing to open offices and regional headquarters there. The Gulf country has also established a “UAE blockchain strategy,” hosts several major crypto events annually and offers visas to remote workers and entrepreneurs along with streamlined procedures for starting businesses.

“They’re leading the way in regulation, definitely trying to be one of the premier jurisdictions where everything is fully regulated,” Jefferson said of Dubai and Abu Dhabi. 

Dubai in 2022 established the Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority, or VARA — the world’s first independent crypto regulator — which oversees virtual asset activities in the emirate and provides licensing and supervision to crypto businesses.

Abu Dhabi Global Market in the UAE capital also updated its digital asset framework in 2023, providing a clearer licensing and regulatory environment for crypto exchanges, custodians, and other virtual asset service providers. 

Despite enjoying a rally in prices in recent years, the crypto industry has faced numerous scandals and controversies over time, from the collapse of FTX to the jailing of the crypto exchange’s founder Sam Bankman-Fried and former Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao.

Before declaring bankruptcy in November of 2022, FTX had established its regional headquarters in Dubai and was one of the early firms issued a license by VARA in March of that year, as the emirate worked to entice crypto businesses.

Zhao, a Dubai resident, has since been released from prison after serving a four-month term on charges of money laundering. He was granted UAE citizenship, though the timing of his Emirati naturalization has not been publicly disclosed.

In February, Dubai-based digital currency exchange Bybit revealed it was the victim of a hack that saw cybercriminals make off with $1.5 billion worth of tokens — the largest-ever crypto heist in history.

The UAE has learned from its experiences, Token2049 attendees told CNBC.

“It’s not easy” to implement robust regulation, Jefferson of DogeOS said. “It’s easy to say, ‘hey, you can do anything here’. It’s harder to do a regulatory framework where other countries around the world will accept it and realize that if you’re a company built here [in the UAE] and under these regulations, it’s legit. So I think that’s probably the most important part.”

Several crypto investors described due diligence work in the UAE as having become more sophisticated, but say regulation is at a level that still makes it friendlier to the industry than the U.S. or Europe.

“People really feel much safer building crypto companies in Dubai versus in the United States — the U.S. is very over-regulated,” said William Athanas, a Miami-based founder. “And that’s something they’re working on – Trump and Elon [Musk] suggested that they would like to remove 10 regulations for every one they add. But we just haven’t really seen that yet.”

On the night of the yacht party, May 1, Bitcoin was trading at $94,808. At the time of publishing, it is trading at $110,538.

Danni Liu, a Chinese national currently based in Sweden who co-founded LIFE Protocol — a platform that uses the blockchain to enable community-driven scientific research — was in Dubai for the first time to attend the crypto conference and DogeOS boat party.

“Before I got here, it felt like the market sentiment was not that high, people were less willing to take risks,” Liu said. “But I came to Dubai, and I see that people are still dancing. I was surprised. The show is going on.”

— CNBC’s Ryan Browne contributed to this report.