A joint report by crypto exchange Bitget and quantitative research firm Block Scholes places the Middle East and Africa as the third most active trader region on the Bitget platform, capturing 18.4% of active traders during the first quarter of 2026.

The findings arrive as Bitcoin recovered from a prolonged drawdown, climbing to four-week highs above $74,000 in mid-April, roughly 40% below its all-time high.

The report, titled "Tokenised Markets on Bitget UEX," tracked trader behavior across Q1 2026, a period marked by elevated geopolitical tension and sustained dollar strength. Southeast Asia led the distribution at 26.2%, followed by South Asia at 20.5%. The Middle East and Africa came in third, well ahead of the CIS region (6.9%), Latin America (5.2%), and the United Kingdom (4.9%).

---

Growth Has Been Building for Years

The 18.4% share is not a sudden spike. According to Bitget's own figures, the exchange reported a 166% year-over-year increase in daily crypto traders across the Middle East as recently as 2024.

Independent data from Chainalysis shows the broader MENA region logged approximately $338.7 billion in crypto inflows and recorded 33% year-on-year growth in on-chain adoption in 2025, lifting its share of global trading volume from under 2% in 2020 to roughly 8% today.

In Q1 2026, Middle East crypto trading volume grew 85% year-on-year, more than double the global average of 40%.

Saudi Arabia alone added 500,000 new users during the same quarter.

Bitget CEO Gracy Chen has pointed to structural forces behind the numbers. "Deeper structural shifts in the digital asset ecosystem are increasingly being led from the Gulf," she said in a separate interview with Gulf Business.

She has also noted a shift in how regional participants approach the asset class: "Investors are increasingly treating crypto as an allocatable asset class rather than a single-asset trade," she said in an interview with CEOWORLD Magazine.

---

UAE Provides the Regulatory Backbone

Much of the Gulf's credibility as a crypto hub traces back to the United Arab Emirates, which has built out one of the most comprehensive regional frameworks for digital assets in the world.

Dubai's Virtual Asset Regulatory Authority (VARA) has licensed more than 20 virtual asset service providers across seven activity categories, with over 600 additional applications currently under review.

A second version of the VARA Rulebook took effect in June 2025, and in August 2025, VARA and the UAE Capital Markets Authority agreed on a mutual recognition framework for VASP licenses.

In a significant move for decentralized finance, UAE Federal Decree Law No. 6 of 2025 extended regulatory coverage to DeFi protocols, closing what had been known as the "just code" defense for protocol developers operating in the jurisdiction.

The Dubai Financial Services Authority also updated its rules in January 2026, placing suitability assessment responsibilities directly on regulated firms.

More than 80 licensed providers now operate across five UAE regulators: VARA, ADGM/FSRA, SCA, DFSA, and the CBUAE.

Circle, the issuer of USDC, secured an Abu Dhabi operating license, a development widely seen as a signal of the jurisdiction's institutional standing.

---

Stablecoins Dominate Actual Usage

Despite the headline trader figures, the practical reality of how most Middle Eastern users engage with crypto is more grounded than speculative. Stablecoins account for 66% of all on-chain transactions in MENA, according to The Middle East Insider.

In Saudi Arabia, stablecoins represent 46.1% of on-chain activity, above the global average of 44.7%, reflecting use cases centered on trade settlement and cross-border payments rather than directional bets on token prices.

In Egypt, where the pound has fallen from roughly 15.7 to 56 against the dollar since 2022, peer-to-peer Bitcoin volume has grown 300%.

Lebanon continues to rely on crypto as a functional substitute for an inaccessible banking system.

These patterns more closely resemble adoption dynamics seen in East Africa and parts of South Asia than the wealth-driven activity typical of Gulf financial centers.

---

RWA Gap Points to Unfinished Business

One notable finding in the Bitget report is the gap between the Middle East and Africa's trader share and its participation in tokenized real-world assets (RWA), which are on-chain representations of traditional financial instruments such as equities, bonds, or property.

Southeast Asia accounts for 81.9% of total RWA volume on the platform. The Middle East and Africa's comparable figure was not disclosed, but the concentration suggests the region remains primarily a spot and derivatives market rather than a financialized one.

Bitget's own tokenized stock service, which went live in early 2026, reached $2 billion in daily volume within three days, $4 billion by January 21, and $6 billion by March 20. These figures are drawn from Bitget's own platform data, though the growth trajectory suggests demand for tokenized instruments exists.

Closing the RWA gap will likely require improvements in on-ramps, clearer legal treatment of tokenized instruments, and deeper local market-maker participation across the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia.

On the Bitcoin price front, analysts are watching $75,000 as a key derivatives release point, where significant gamma and options exposure would be expected to unwind. A move through that level could open a path toward the $80,000 to $80,600 range, with $87,519, the 200-day moving average, serving as the longer-term recovery target beyond that.

Chen has said that Federal Reserve rate cuts in 2026 could push Bitcoin back toward the $95,000 to $100,000 range, supported by improving liquidity.

Saudi Arabia's own digital asset regulatory framework, expected from its Capital Market Authority in late 2026, will likely shape how that potential demand is channeled once local licensed infrastructure comes online.

Readers should note that Bitget is simultaneously the exchange whose platform generated the underlying data, the publisher of the report, and a commercial beneficiary of narratives that frame the Middle East and Africa as a high-growth market. The timing of the report's release coincides with a Bitcoin recovery rally toward key technical resistance levels, which suggests that institutional narratives around regional demand may be amplified partly for market sentiment purposes. Readers are encouraged to weigh the data against the commercial incentives of the reporting parties.