Egypt: a near-total ban, no licences ever issued, and one of the largest unregulated USDT markets in the region

Egypt is, for our purposes, one of the most interesting markets in this entire series — precisely because the door is officially shut. There is no licensing regime. No company holds a permit to operate. Digital-asset activity is prohibited by default. And yet beneath that prohibition sits a vast, fast-growing, entirely unregulated peer-to-peer market in dollar stablecoins, fed by a currency that has lost half its value and a population desperate to protect what it has.

A market with overwhelming demand and zero licensed supply is not a closed market. It is an opening.

Orientation: the scale of the flow

Egypt has over 110 million people and is one of the largest remittance economies in the world. In 2024 it received around $29.4 billion in remittances — a remarkable 51 percent jump on the prior year — with the bulk arriving from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Kuwait. The UAE corridor, in particular, sits right in the heart of the corridors we serve.

This is an enormous, essential cross-border flow. And it is moving through a financial system under severe strain.

The currency shock

In March 2024, the Central Bank of Egypt devalued the pound by roughly 40 percent in a single day, sending the exchange rate from around 31 to over 50 per US dollar. For millions of Egyptians, that was nearly half their savings gone overnight. Inflation has run above 30 percent, and strict capital controls have made accessing dollars through formal channels difficult and slow.

The behavioural response is by now familiar to readers of this series. Egyptians reached for USDT as a practical dollar-denominated savings account — one that needs no bank, no foreign-currency approval, and no paperwork. A stablecoin holds its value while the pound falls, and it moves across borders in minutes.

The ban — and why it is the opportunity

Here is what makes Egypt distinctive. The Central Bank of Egypt prohibits issuing, trading, promoting, or operating platforms for digital assets without prior central-bank approval — and no such approval has ever been granted. That creates a de facto total ban, backed by serious penalties: imprisonment and fines of up to ten million Egyptian pounds. As recently as 2025, the central bank issued a renewed public warning after a surge in online stablecoin advertising aimed at Egyptians.

Now hold that next to the reality. Digital-asset activity in Egypt surged by over 40 percent in 2025. The country is on track for well over ten million active users and is expected to reach more than thirteen million by 2026. The entire market runs peer-to-peer: Egyptians trade pounds for USDT through escrow-based platforms, and a USDT transfer sent to a family wallet typically converts to pounds within the hour — at rates consistently better than formal wire channels, given the historical gap between the official and parallel pound rates.

So Egypt has demand measured in the millions of users and tens of billions in remittances, and a licensed, regulated supply of exactly zero. Every transaction happens informally, outside any compliance framework, because there is no legal way to do it formally. For an industry whose entire purpose is to bring these flows into a regulated, auditable, compliant structure, that gap is the point.

What it means for treasury infrastructure

I want to be careful and honest here, because the ban is real and the penalties are severe. No responsible operator enters Egypt today by ignoring the law. The opportunity is not to add to the informal market. It is to be positioned for the moment Egypt does what the pattern across this series suggests it eventually must: open a regulated framework, as Nigeria, Pakistan, and others have begun to do, because the flows are too large and too economically vital to leave permanently in the dark.

When that happens, the market dynamics are extraordinary. A country with millions of existing USDT users, tens of billions in remittances, a major UAE corridor, and not a single licensed incumbent is about as clean a greenfield as a regulated treasury-infrastructure and settlement business could ask for. First-mover advantage in a market like that is not incremental. It is foundational.

My read

Egypt is a watch-and-prepare market, not a today market. The legal position is unambiguous, and that has to be respected. But the underlying conditions — a halved currency, capital controls, $29 billion in remittances, a dominant UAE corridor, millions of USDT users, and zero licensed competition — describe one of the most attractive eventual opportunities anywhere in our region.

The lesson Egypt teaches is the inverse of the usual one. Normally a ban signals a closed market. Here, a ban that demand has comprehensively ignored signals the opposite: an enormous, proven appetite waiting for the day a compliant, regulated rail is finally allowed to serve it. The work now is to understand the market deeply and be ready when the door opens.