Last week I went to Dubai. I didn’t much like it; Dubai feels as if the brief was to build a city but to leave out all the things that make cities good. Then again, I was there for a crypto conference. And my overall impression of that was – if Western sanctions are indeed shutting Russians out of the world economy, someone should tell the Russians.
The free ice cream at the gate was sponsored by a crypto company promising seamless exchanges between roubles and the dollar stablecoin USDT; an exhibitor offered to deliver you cash in an hour when you transferred them some crypto; and the title sponsor was A7A5, fresh from being sanctioned by the European Union, but very much alive, kicking, and cheerfully distributing stickers to people who took a spin on its wheel of fortune.
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The centre of the hall was dominated by a crypto-trading competition, in which a number of people sat behind screens and sought to make a profit while against the clock. Despite the best efforts of two fast-talking Russian MCs, as a spectator sport, it had all the charm of watching an HR department finishing up the month’s payroll. Still, the competition drew the biggest crowd simply for the lack of other things going on.
None of the whales that might once have come to a Dubai crypto conference were present, now all the action has spectacularly moved to Washington, DC. Check out this Reuters investigation into how much cash The Trump Organization has made in just the first six months of 2025: “the U.S. president’s family raked in more than $800 million from sales of crypto assets in the first half of 2025 alone”, with “potentially billions more in unrealized ‘on paper’ gains”, mostly from foreign sources.
Those who did make it to Dubai intoned the usual verities about crypto ushering in a new age of liberty, despite the huge contradictions all around them. Particularly bewildering was a panel featuring Vít Jedlička, a Czech libertarian and founder of “start-up nation” Liberland, alongside Nabil Arnous, whose job is to bring investment into “Innovation City”, a newly-renamed AI-powered free trade zone in the absolute monarchy that is Ras Al Khaimah, one of the seven emirates that make up the UAE. The blockchain is powerful indeed if it can unite people from such supposedly opposite political poles.
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Even more head-scratching to me though was a presentation by Reeve Collins, who co-founded Tether and was an early advocate of all things crypto, He came to Dubai to pitch his idea for “white label” stablecoins which would allow companies to put their name on a dollar-pegged cryptocurrency while leaving all the hard work of running the blockchain to someone else.
Why might companies want to do that? Because every time they sell something, they get to collect even more data about their clients than they already do, as well as earning profit from issuing money that currently goes to the government.