CoinSchedule: UAE accounted for 25%+ of all funds raised in digital coin offerings in 2019 through early April, as US falls from being the leader in 2018 to 7th
Olga Kharif / Bloomberg :
Context & Ripple Effects
CoinSchedule's tally marks a reversal at the top of the token market: the United States, which led digital coin offering fundraising in 2018, slid to seventh by early April 2019, while the UAE captured more than a quarter of all funds raised. The shift reads as issuance migrating toward jurisdictions perceived as more permissive.
The UAE's early lead proved durable rather than episodic: Abu Dhabi later positioned itself as a landing spot for crypto firms like Copper, Phoenix, Paxos, and eToro chasing friendlier regulators (Abu Dhabi's courtship of crypto companies), even as Chainalysis found MENA was the world's fastest-growing crypto market by transaction volume (MENA's fastest-growing crypto market).
First-order effects
- Token issuers that would previously have raised in the US now route offerings through the UAE, redirecting investor capital and listing activity away from American markets.
Second-order effects
- Gulf neighbors respond competitively: Saudi Arabia went on to capture a 52% share of MENA VC funding in 2023, beating the UAE for the first time (Saudi Arabia overtaking the UAE in regional VC share), turning regulatory hospitality into a bidding contest for startup capital.
Third-order effects
- Concentrating coin issuance where oversight is thin carries a cost: US authorities later identified Dubai as a leading home for crypto scams, including Ponzi schemes that took in over $3.4B since 2017 (Dubai's emergence as a crypto-scam hub) — the structural trade-off between easy fundraising and the legitimacy gap it breeds.
The trend: Crypto capital formation is migrating from heavily regulated Western markets to Gulf jurisdictions competing on regulatory leniency, trading fundraising ease for growing fraud and legitimacy risk.