Joining me now is Roman Affan, Head of Custody and Market Operations at BurjX. Roman, welcome to the show.
Thank you for having me. I appreciate your time.
Has the AI buildout been sucking liquidity out of crypto?
Absolutely. The AI trade has been dominating for the last year and a half to two years. Everybody has been allocating money to memory stocks and AI adjacent equities. The question was never whether crypto needed clarity — it is just when was it going to catch a bid. And the moment governments announced they would put fresh proposals together to give it clarity, things started moving.
The Anthropic IPO is expected to land in September. Does that pull money away from crypto or has the floor already been established?
I want to say the floor has been established. It is very hard to see a world where this pump retraces back to the lows. Although markets can remain irrational for a long time. The interesting thing about the IPO is that it is not a surprise — everybody has been waiting for it. So I would actually argue crypto inflows would have been greater if it were not for people waiting for the Anthropic IPO. Where I think the money will come out of is the AI trade itself — out of memory stocks and AI adjacent equities, and into the Anthropic IPO. So it is an AI-to-AI rotation, not a crypto-to-AI rotation.
Why are stablecoins now becoming how AI agents pay each other?
Company A headquartered in Europe. Their customer Company B headquartered in the United States. Historically, the payment goes through the Swift network, through intermediary banks, with fees on every leg of the transaction and manual checks before funds ever land. Now an AI agent can spin up a blockchain wallet in seconds, fund it in seconds, and settle wallet to wallet in seconds more. It just becomes the faster and cheaper way to move money around the world.
BurjX went from exchange to custody, OTC, stablecoin infrastructure. Tell us about that story.
Our founder and CEO Omar Abbas comes from the North American crypto market, where he launched and scaled what is now the leading regulated exchange in Canada. When he came to the UAE, he saw a gap — there was no easy way to move money from dirhams into crypto, or sell crypto and move dirhams back into a bank account. The mission was always to be the fastest and most efficient way to move dirhams to crypto and vice versa. And what we learned quickly was that the North American market is not the UAE crypto market. North America is very retail-first. The UAE is very much stablecoin infrastructure-first. The UAE is one of the densest stablecoin economies in the world — billions of dollars move in and out every year — and there needs to be a platform that supports these types of flows. We serve a retail client with 100 dirhams with the same customer service, speed of settlement, and competitive rates as an institutional client with 100 million dirhams.
Does being home-grown and headquartered in the UAE actually matter to clients, or is it just marketing?
It is a good marketing line because it is true — and that is why it matters. In financial services and crypto specifically, trust is the most important thing. And unfortunately the crypto industry has been plagued by mistrust over the past few years. When you are built here, headquartered here, and working with the regulators here, it shines a different light on a platform like ours. Other global brands parachute into the region, but very few are built and regulated here. We chose ADGM as our regulator because we do not intend to be a fly-by-night exchange. We intend to be here for decades. And that is how we do business at BurjX — where trust stands tall.
Thank you so much for being here with us.
Thank you for having me.
