It’s 4.30pm on a Friday, and the banking cut-off is approaching. Miss it, and what should take minutes can slip into weekend limbo – not clearing until Tuesday.
That is the problem Omer Kaya, a Dubai-based agency founder, kept running into. Now, he avoids traditional bank transfers. Instead, he uses USDT – a stablecoin pegged to the US dollar – to send and receive cross-border payments outside banking hours. In many markets, it has become the most widely used stablecoin, largely because it is the most liquid and widely accepted.
“The bank held the transfer for a compliance check right as they were closing for the weekend,” Kaya says. At the time, he was waiting on a five-figure payment he needed before the weekend to keep a Monday-morning campaign on track. “I spent the next 48 hours in total limbo. In our business, a delay is a failure."
For Kaya, it’s a business fix. Across the Gulf and its wider neighbourhood, stablecoins are increasingly being used for something bigger: remittances.
Kaya’s deadline scramble is a familiar one across the Gulf, where families, freelancers and small businesses move money across borders every day – and feel every delay. Global remittances reached $905 billion last year, according to the World Bank. For many households, that flow covers rent, groceries and medicine – expenses that don’t wait for banking hours.
Yet the fees remain stubborn. The World Bank puts the global average cost of sending $200 at 6.49%, more than double the UN’s target. The gap between urgent need and slow, expensive transfers has created an opening. In the Gulf, stablecoins are increasingly filling it.
Stablecoin transfers don’t care what day it is. They can clear in minutes, even late at night or on a Sunday, when traditional cross-border wires effectively stop.
And the scale is no longer niche. Cross-border stablecoin flows reached $1.5 trillion in 2024, according to IMF estimates – a figure that suggests these tokens are being used for more than person-to-person remittances. In emerging markets, the same always-on “parallel rail” is increasingly being used for trade and corporate settlements as well.
Regulators are already moving to keep pace. Dubai’s Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority (VARA) oversees virtual asset activity across the emirate, while the UAE Central Bank has introduced licensing requirements for payment services tied to stablecoins. In Saudi Arabia, the central bank has also run regulatory sandbox programmes for new digital financial products.
A wallet address solves a paperwork problem, and it also creates new exposure. Converting stablecoins into spendable local currency still depends on exchanges, bank accounts and payment platforms – each with their own compliance checks. Transfers can be delayed or frozen, and scams thrive in channels where newcomers move money fast and ask questions later.
Cem Sunbul, a business developer at ZIGChain in Turkiye, runs into the same wall from the other side. Every time a new global client signs, the script begins. “They say, ‘Great, send me your PayPal,’ and I have to have a rather unpleasant conversation.”
PayPal has been unavailable in Turkiye since 2016. Stripe isn’t an option. Wise can be inconsistent. The back-and-forth drains time – and credibility. Sunbul says the breaking point came last year when he lost a $3,000 contract because his bank couldn’t produce an English confirmation letter in time, a common requirement for international wire transfers.
Now, his onboarding is a single line of text: a wallet address. Sunbul admits that asking for crypto narrows his client pool, but he accepts the trade-off. “I would rather have access to 10% of the global market earning in dollars than 100% of the local market earning in lira,” he says. “It’s a calculated risk.”
Sunbul says the irony is that Turkiye’s domestic banking tech is strong – it’s the global access that breaks down. “Our banking tech in Turkiye is actually amazing,” he says, “but it’s disconnected from the world.”
His workaround is a hybrid loop: a stablecoin payment arrives in his wallet, he converts it into Turkish lira through an exchange, then withdraws it using FAST, the country’s 24/7 instant payment system. “I click ‘withdraw’, and the lira is in my bank account in seconds,” he says. “I can buy groceries two minutes after a client in Dubai pays me.”
The parallel rail now extends beyond freelancers and small businesses. Mansa CEO Mouloukou Sanoh says stablecoins are increasingly being used for B2B trade, where delays can stall working capital and shipments.
Mansa, a cross-border payments company, says it has processed more than $400 million in stablecoin-based transactions, including large transfers tied to trade.
For Dr Cagla Gul Senkardes, head of tech entrepreneurship at Istanbul Bilgi University, that shift reflects a change in crypto’s purpose. Bitcoin, she argues, emerged as a manifesto against banks. Stablecoins, by contrast, function as a corridor built for pragmatic use – especially in high-inflation markets where trust in local currency has frayed.
“The crisis of trust that emerges when promises are broken again and again results in stablecoins filling the gap,” she says. In the West, Senkardes argues, crypto is often framed as an opportunity to grow wealth. In the Middle East and other volatile markets, it is increasingly about preventing loss.
As stablecoin use grows, regulators are moving fast. Selva Ozelli, an international tax attorney, points to tightening global standards around who is holding the digital wallet – and who is accountable for the funds moving through it.
For an SME in Dubai using USDT, she says, the risk in 2026 is less the transfer itself than the compliance tail that follows. As governments push for “Travel Rule” compliance – requiring identifying information about senders and recipients – the informal economy is rapidly becoming visible.
“Nations resist ceding financial sovereignty,” Ozelli says, noting that newer frameworks are shifting the burden of compliance onto managers, potentially exposing them to personal liability.
Reeve Collins, a former co-founder of Tether and now chairman of WeFi, frames the long arc in simple terms: the US dollar is increasingly moving across open, digital networks. By 2030, he predicts, the wallet will function as the branch, with banks competing to provide trust and compliance inside apps.
Back in Dubai, Kaya closes his laptop and gets on with his weekend. In Turkiye, Sunbul checks a balance and buys groceries. The most striking part of this parallel rail is how ordinary it can feel: a deadline saved, a fee avoided, a transfer that arrives on Sunday. In a $905 billion remittance world, demand for always-on money keeps building, one Friday cut-off at a time.
