Two years ago there was one licensed AED stablecoin in the UAE. Today there are eight distinct, dated, CBUAE-, ADGM-, DIFC-, or VARA-approved digital money instruments live in the market, plus a sovereign-backed one settling in production and a bank-issued tokenised deposit operating alongside them. Here is the complete map, current as of July 2026.
We keep this table current because we get asked the same question in almost every conversation with a bank's digital transformation team: "who else has actually done this?" Not who has announced a pilot - who is live, approved, and transacting. Below is every instrument that meets that bar, with the date each one entered the market.
What the pattern actually shows
Read chronologically, the pattern is unmistakable: this went from a single first-mover in October 2024 to eight live instruments in under two years, with the pace of new approvals accelerating, not slowing, through 2025 and into 2026. A market that had one licensed entrant now has banks, an ADGM/DIFC-recognised global issuer, a sovereign-backed consortium, and a Foreign Payment Token operator all live simultaneously.
Two categories sit inside this table, and the distinction matters for any bank deciding what to build. Six of these entries are stablecoins governed by PTSR - CBUAE Circular 2/2024 - as either Dirham Payment Tokens (AED-denominated, full CBUAE licence) or Foreign Payment Tokens (non-AED, CBUAE registration). One, the HSBC entry, is a tokenised deposit: a bank's own deposit liability on a distributed ledger, requiring no PTSR licence at all because it isn't a third-party instrument. We've written separately about why that structural difference makes tokenised deposits the more defensible starting point for a licensed bank - this table is the market evidence behind that argument.
This table lives permanently on our Regulatory Intelligence Hub, where it sits alongside the underlying frameworks - PTSR, FDL 6/2025, the Digital Dirham, and CBUAE Open Finance - that govern everything in it. We're publishing it here as well because a static reference page doesn't always surface when a new entrant lands. This post will stay updated as the market moves.