Stacy Pereira
- Emirates & Crypto.com sign MoU to enable crypto payments for flights and duty‑free shopping.
- Emirates joins Air Arabia among Gulf carriers that accept AE Coin for flight bookings via the AEC Wallet.
- The initiatives aligns with UAE’s goals under the 2025 Digital Strategy and Dubai’s D33 vision.
Gulf carrier, Emirates, announced it has signed a preliminary deal with Crypto.com that will allow its customers to make payments through the crypto trading platform’s payment service.
Sheikh Ahmed bin Saeed Al Maktoum, Emirates’ Chairman & CEO, and Mohammed Al Hakim, head of Crypto.com UAE, unveiled the agreement at Emirates HQ, highlighting Dubai’s ambition to lead in financial innovation and cater to tech-savvy travelers.
The partnership, which is expected to come into effect next year, wants to cater to those “customers who prefer digital currencies”, Adnan Kazim, Emirates’ deputy president and chief commercial officer, Reuters reported.
This MoU will enable travelers to use crypto for airline tickets, retail, and duty‑free purchases, all underpinned by a regulatory-compliant framework. It sets the stage for a unified crypto-payment infrastructure across transit and tourism in the UAE. This gives global travelers the flexibility and also pushes stablecoins’ use case into the mainstream.
The United Arab Emirates has been emerging as a key hub for crypto companies in recent years, with several setting up shop or seeking to expand, and has enabled payments via cryptocurrencies in areas like real estate, transportation, and fuel.
In Dubai, which set up watchdog VARA in 2022 to regulate the emerging virtual asset sector, one of the city’s largest free zones, the DMCC, hosts more than 650 crypto firms.
Other airlines have in recent years adopted cryptocurrencies as payment options. In the Gulf, Dubai-listed Air Arabia said in May it would accept UAE dirham-backed stablecoin AE Coin for flight bookings.
