Sphere Labs Expands to the United Arab Emirates

The UAE's total foreign trade hit $1.4 trillion in 2024, up 49% from 2021, cementing its position as the leading trade hub in the Middle East and Africa and ranking 11th globally in merchandise exports. It's also one of the most forward-thinking jurisdictions for digital asset regulation: the Central Bank's Payment Token Services Regulation now fully applies across mainland UAE, requiring businesses in the digital payment token space to be fully licensed to operate.

This combination of cross-border activity, regulatory clarity, and government commitment to financial innovation makes the UAE an ideal launchpad for scaling stablecoin-based payment infrastructure—and it's why Sphere is officially establishing a presence there.

Why the UAE

‍The UAE sits at the intersection of global trade corridors connecting Asia, Africa, and Europe. Its clear regulatory framework for stablecoins and payment tokens, combined with institutional appetite for innovation, creates an environment where infrastructure like Sphere's can scale with the rigor that financial institutions require.

Trade finance is the specific opportunity. The global trade finance gap exceeds $2.5 trillion, with MENA's share estimated at $123 billion. In the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), SMEs receive just 2% of total bank lending despite comprising over 95% of registered businesses. The structural cause is correspondent banking: cross-border B2B payments in the region still take 3–5 days to settle, with only half of wholesale transactions clearing within an hour. Transaction costs can run 10x higher than domestic equivalents, compounding across the multi-leg transactions standard in commodity and import/export flows.

The UAE sits at the center of these flows. It's the world's second-largest outbound remittance hub after the United States, with $43 billion in annual outflows—half moving to just three corridors: India, Pakistan, and the Philippines. Add trade remittances and the commercial payment flows underlying that foreign trade volume, and the concentration of cross-border activity is substantial.

Stablecoin-based settlement addresses the underlying inefficiency directly: near-instant finality, reduced counterparty exposure, and elimination of the intermediary fees that erode margin on multi-currency transactions. The infrastructure to support this is maturing. The Central Bank's Financial Infrastructure Transformation (FIT) programme is modernizing domestic rails. Regional systems like AFAQ (connecting GCC central banks for real-time local-currency settlement) and Buna (the Arab Monetary Fund's multi-currency platform) are reducing dependence on correspondent banking for intra-regional flows. The regulatory frameworks now in place across mainland UAE and the financial free zones create a licensing pathway for payment infrastructure providers to operate alongside these systems, not outside them.

Ahmad Juma joins as Head of UAE

To lead this effort, Ahmad Juma is joining Sphere as Head of UAE. As Sphere's first hire in the region, Ahmad will drive regional partnerships, regulatory initiatives, and team expansion.

Ahmad brings direct experience as a founder with deep expertise in commodities trading–a background that aligns with Sphere's focus on real-economy cross-border payments. His familiarity with regional market dynamics and relationships across financial and regulatory circles position him to execute with the precision the region demands.

Building for the long term

Sphere is establishing a UAE entity and pursuing the regulatory authorizations required to operate as a licensed payment infrastructure provider.

The objective is a fully operational hub capable of serving the region's banks, trading houses, and corporations directly. That means building relationships with the financial institutions that anchor regional trade, hiring local talent with regulatory and market expertise, and ensuring Sphere's infrastructure meets the compliance standards these counterparties require.

Sphere's approach in the region mirrors its global strategy: compliance-first infrastructure, embedded KYC/KYB, transparent settlement, and direct engagement with regulators.

About Sphere Labs

Sphere Labs (“Sphere”) empowers businesses and developers worldwide with secure, cost-effective, and near-instant cross-border payments.

SpherePay, the company's flagship product, is a payments platform that helps businesses and fintechs accept, manage, and move money globally. Through developer-focused APIs and a point-and-click dashboard, customers can collect payments, run subscriptions, transfer funds across borders, and convert between fiat and digital assets, while staying compliant with built-in KYC/KYB.

SphereNet: a natively compliant settlement network designed to enable global regulated financial connectivity, providing a shared ledger for discovering counterparties, exchanging payment instructions, and attesting to settlement across borders, without relying on a single intermediary.

Sphere is supported by Coinbase, Kraken, The Chernin Group, Jump Trading, Hudson River Trading, and some of the largest sovereign affiliates and commodities houses in the world.

For more information, visit www.spherepay.co.

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