There are 112 countries that are — in one way or another — exploring central bank digital currency (CBDC). Of this number, 11 countries have launched their own CBDCs, 15 are piloting, 26 are developing and 46 are researching. This trend appears to have reached the UAE, with the country’s central bank collaborating with various international agencies. In 2019, the Central Bank of the UAE (CBUAE) piloted a wholesale CBDC project with Saudi Central Bank named of “ABER.” A final report was published in 2020, which showed that “the distributed ledger technology would enable central banks to develop payments systems at both local and cross-border levels.” More recently, the CBUAE — along with the BIS Innovation Hub Hong Kong Centre and the central banks of Hong Kong, Thailand and China — implemented Project mBridge, a joint initiative experimenting with cross-border payments using a custom-built common platform based on distributed ledger technology (DLT) upon which multiple centr...