New crypto platform seeks to expand in the UAE

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Liminal, a premier wallet infrastructure & custody solutions platform, has applied for a licence at the Abu Dhabi Global Market (ADGM) to begin its operations in the UAE.

The two-year-old firm recently announced that it has processed transactions worth $5.6 billion on its platform, with over $550 million worth of assets under protection. Despite the digital assets industry experiencing a downturn, Liminal has grown its customer base annually by 178 per cent CAGR and gross revenue from customers at 73.5 per cent CAGR annually

Mahin Gupta, founder of Liminal, remained confident about the cryptocurrency sector despite all the bad press surrounding FTX and the bloodbath in digital assets last year. “If there is a bad actor inside an ecosystem, they got rooted out, that’s not a bad thing. So I think after FTX what has happened is everywhere you are seeing a clear cut direction coming on the digital asset ecosystem,” Gupta told Khaleej Times in an interview.

Gupta believes that over time, regualtion will become more uniform across the globe. “If you see in a 10-year horizon , then I think the regulatory unevenness between different different regions will go away. The innovation will be there, people will be using digital assets, either as a prt of investment or as a part of underlying fundamental technology,” he said.

Despite the recent crypto bounce, Gupta still believes that digital assets remain a risky investment. “I would say this is a risky asset class, please invest more time in understanding it and then make an investment decision,” he advises potential investors.

With Dubai introducing the Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority (Vara) and the ADGM also coming out with digital asset regulation norms, Gupta believes that the UAE has taken the first-mover advantage in the field of digital asset regulation. “There is so much clarity in what the regulators want to do. They have a clear idea about how they want to look at Metaverse, how they want to look at trading, how they want to look at custody and how they want to look at blockchain as a service and blockchain as a platform for other applications,” Gupta said.

Currently, there are about 400 businesses in the digital asset sector in the UAE, according to Gupta. “I have no doubt that this number will cross 1000 by the end of this year or next year and you would see that impact more and more people are involved in the ecosystem,” Gupta said.