Following E.U’s implementation of MiCA, the crypto industry now eagerly awaits the outcome of the debate around the CLARITY Act in the U.S.
If passed, it would mark the biggest regulatory move in the largest digital assets market in the world. The race to be the hub of crypto is heating up, but what seems contradictory, might actually be complimentary.
Bitcoin Suisse CEO Andrej Majcen in this exclusive interview with The Coin Headlines talks about the battle between the different regions when it comes to crypto regulations and where UAE stand in this race. He speaks about how crypto regulation and stablecoins are becoming the drivers of crypto adoption.
EU recently rolled out MiCA – a single regulation opening up the entire region to crypto companies. Meanwhile, in the UAE we see Abu Dhabi and Dubai having different regulatory laws. How does this work and is this better or worse?
MiCA‘s strength is harmonization: one license, one rulebook, access to an entire economic area. That is a genuine milestone, and it is already changing how companies plan in Europe. The UAE took the opposite route: specialized regulators that move fast and evolve with the market, and it works.
So, is one model better? I don’t think that is the right question. What firms and investors need is clarity. Knowing the rules and trusting that regulators can adapt as technology evolves. Europe achieves that through harmonization, the UAE through specialization. Both beat the alternative, which is ambiguity.
With US planning its own regulations will this help crypto maintain its borderless identity or will it become a hurdle for new users?
I think this worry rests on a misunderstanding of what crypto’s promise has always been. It’s never been about operating outside the law, but about enabling verification instead relying on blind trust. The networks themselves stay borderless; that is mathematics, and no legislation changes it. But regulated financial services have always lived within legal frameworks, and there is no contradiction between the two.
In fact, regulation is precisely what is driving the current wave of institutional adoption. Certainty around custody, market conduct and investor protection is what lets a pension fund or a family office allocate. We have seen this happen in Switzerland for a decade, and now in the US at far greater scale.
What I would like to see is alignment on core principles across jurisdictions, with room for local implementation. I think good regulations don’t restrict innovation but gives it somewhere solid to stand.
With the geopolitical tensions investors seem reluctant to commit to crypto but at the same time stablecoin transactions are increasing. How do you see this going forward?
These two trends look contradictory only if you still think of crypto as one single trade. It stopped being that some time ago.
On the investment side, yes, capital has become more selective. Our latest Industry Rollup shows digital assets now compete for allocation against AI-related companies, global equities and fixed income, not just against each other. And I think the research speaks for itself: that same research shows Bitcoin’s risk-adjusted returns over the past twelve months have been poor. We publish that ourselves. But that is precisely my point — Bitcoin today trades like a macro asset responding to a regime change in interest rates, not like a casino. I have said before that Bitcoin is on its way to becoming a boring asset, and I mean that as the biggest bull case there is. Boring is probably where it ends up, and boring is what institutions buy.
On the infrastructure side, stablecoins have quietly become the plumbing of digital finance. A market of more than USD 300 billion that settled over USD 33 trillion in transactions last year and increasingly used for cross-border settlement and liquidity management that has nothing to do with speculation.
So, investors are pausing on directional risk while adopting the rails underneath. I think that is exactly what the early shape of a new financial system looks like.
How will these regions – EU, U.S. and UAE fight for dominance and who is set to be the epicenter of crypto?
I think looking for a single winner misreads how financial systems develop. Traditional finance has New York, London, Zurich, Singapore, Hong Kong, each doing a different job. Digital assets are heading the same way, just faster.
The US brings the deepest capital markets, and its regulatory momentum is driving institutional flows at a scale nobody else can match. Europe built the first harmonized framework for an entire economic area with MiCA. And the UAE has done something I’d say is remarkable: it built credible, specialized regulatory environments in a fraction of the time it took anyone else and backed them with genuine national commitment. It has earned a place on the map that took other centers decades to establish.
Consider where adoption stands: our last Wealth Management Report put digital assets at around 0.2 percent of global financial assets, that’s roughly where gold stood in the 1970s, before it became a standard portfolio component. If digital assets follow even part of that path, the idea that one jurisdiction captures it all is probably not serious. Capital and talent will pool wherever regulatory clarity meets institutional credibility and that will be several places at once.
We built Bitcoin Suisse for exactly that world. From Swiss crypto-native roots dating back to 2013, the Group today employs more than 200 professionals across Switzerland, the European Economic Area, the United Arab Emirates and Bermuda. Our clients think globally and what they need from us increasingly goes beyond trading and custody. Our long-term ambition is to be their wealth management partner: crypto-native in our DNA, holistic in how we serve them. The firms that win the next decade will be the ones that can meet them everywhere, not the ones betting on a single postcode.
Following Bitcoin Suisse in Abu Dhabi, Revolut too got its initial clearance in Dubai. What makes the UAE such an attractive destination for crypto platforms?
I can give you a very personal answer: We haven’t just opened a new Bitcoin Suisse group entity here. I relocated here myself, and Ceyda Majcen, who leads our Middle East business, is building the team on the ground. That is how convinced we are of the model.
The UAE sits at the intersection of finance, technology, capital, and regulation in a way few places do. You have regulatory clarity, a deeply international investor base, serious financial infrastructure and a government that treats digital assets as part of its economic strategy. It is an obvious base for any firm serving global clients.
What are the services that Bitcoin Suisse will be able to provide now that you have the registration completed?
The license allows us to bring Bitcoin Suisse’s institutional virtual asset services to the UAE through a locally regulated platform. BTCS (Middle East) Ltd. provides professional investors with OTC spot trading, tailored derivatives and institutional-grade custody of accepted virtual assets, regulated by the Financial Services Regulatory Authority (FSRA) of ADGM.
But I want to be clear about what we are really bringing here. When we started in Zug in 2013, our conviction was that virtual assets would only reach institutions if someone built the trust layer first — the custody, the governance, the people you can actually call. That is what we have refined over more than a decade and multiple market cycles, and that is what launches in Abu Dhabi now. Our clients will work directly with experienced trading and relationship teams, whether that means executing OTC trades with discretion, structuring tailored derivatives for hedging, or safeguarding accepted virtual assets in institutional-grade custody.
Professional investors here should be able to expect the same standards from a virtual asset partner that they expect from any established financial partner.
