Dubai’s virtual assets regulatory ecosystem did not build itself. It took visionaries who understood both the technology and the institution. Joining me is Dr. Ayesha Binlootah, Digital Assets Chief Advisor. Ayesha, welcome to Capital Markets Wall Street to Mena. Your career spans banking, government, economic development, and digital assets. What has driven your journey?
I have never really been looking at my career from a conventional perspective. I was very curious as a child. I started coding when I was 13. That really shaped my perspective. From jumping from sector to sector, today I am very comfortable whether we are talking about digital assets, financial services — I can look at entire economic sectors, not only at one specific one.
How has your experience across the private sector, government, and regulation shaped your leadership?
Banking taught me financial discipline. Government taught me policy. Economic development taught me how to attract investors, how to build an ecosystem, how to build the economic competitiveness of Dubai. And regulation taught me how to enable building that ecosystem not only from an innovative way, but also while not compromising compliance.
As a founding architect of VARA — what were the biggest challenges in building a regulatory framework for a new industry?
When I speak about VARA specifically — starting from four years ago, there was really no rulebook globally. No playbook for how to start a digital asset regulator. Everyone else was just figuring it out. We were looking at different benchmarks, different cities. Then it took a lot of courage to establish an independent regulatory authority that looks only at digital assets and not financial services. One of the biggest challenges was how can you start something from scratch and at the same time make sure that you do not compromise on the standards you want to build — attract investment to the ecosystem and enable those businesses in Dubai.
VARA has 57 fully licensed entities — is that the right number?
There are around 200 if you include prop traders and everything else. But fully licensed VASPs — we have 57.
Looking toward 2030 — how will tokenisation, institutional adoption, and AI transform investing?
The way I see this today is really inspiring. Four years ago, digital asset adoption in the UAE was around 10%. Last year it was around 30%. By this year we expect even more. People used to think traditional finance would compete with digital assets. But we are starting to see institutional adoption from banks getting licences for custody, broker dealer, and everything else. We have also moved from tokenisation pilots and hype to actual implementation use cases — whether real estate, gold, or bonds — you can actually see it happening. The future of finance will be hybrid. And it will unlock a very significant component of the investor base we do not touch today. Someone who needed 4 million dirhams to buy a property can invest with 500 or 1,000 dirhams and get a yield. We will see cross-border transfers and international settlement in stablecoins — faster remittances, instant settlement, more international trade.
Thank you so much for being here with us.
Thank you so much for having me.
