Standard Chartered Launches Spot Bitcoin and Ether Trading in the UAE

Standard Chartered opened spot Bitcoin (BTC) and Ether (ETH) trading to institutional clients in the United Arab Emirates on Thursday, claiming the mantle of first major global lender to do so in the Gulf state.

Execution runs through the bank’s Dubai International Financial Centre-regulated entity and onto its foreign-exchange trading desk. Same electronic rails it uses for institutional dollar and euro flows. Standard Chartered also billed itself as the first Global Systemically Important Bank to offer institutional digital asset trading in the region.

Eligible clients buy and sell spot BTC and ETH through the bank’s existing electronic trading channels. Custody stays in-house. The crypto desk sits inside the foreign-exchange trading operation, folding digital assets into the same workflow Standard Chartered runs for fiat currencies.

The UAE rollout extends a build-out that got underway two years ago. Standard Chartered rolled out digital asset custody in the country in September 2024. A year later, the bank stood up a spot crypto trading desk in London, placing it among the first global banks to enter spot cryptocurrency trading, with the crypto desk folded into the forex trading operation. The same year, Standard Chartered debuted a tokenization unit called Libeara to help institutions tokenize traditional assets.

Rola Abu Manneh, CEO for the UAE, Middle East and Pakistan at Standard Chartered, framed the move as a question of integration. “By combining execution with secure custody, governance and the connectivity of a global bank, we are providing clients with a more integrated way to participate in digital asset markets,” she said in the announcement. Abu Manneh pointed to the UAE’s regulatory framework as the enabling condition. “The UAE has developed a clear digital assets regulatory framework that supports institutional participation and innovation,” she said.

The announcement did not detail the specific license underpinning the spot launch beyond the DIFC-regulated entity. No trading-volume limits. No fee schedule. No client onboarding timeline.

The launch lands as Gulf regulators widen the aperture for institutional crypto. In June, Standard Chartered entered a banking agreement with crypto exchange CoinMENA, covering fiat on- and off-ramps, client money accounts and virtual account-based transaction management. Neobank Revolut secured in-principle approval from Dubai’s Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority a month later. Trading platform Capital.com followed in August, saying it would offer spot crypto in the UAE after obtaining a virtual-asset license from the country’s Capital Market Authority.

Read that cluster of moves as a regional push to court institutional capital. The price side of the trade goes unmentioned.

Geoffrey Kendrick, Standard Chartered’s global head of digital assets research, conceded in an August investor note that his earlier $100,000 year-end bitcoin forecast was “too low.” Kendrick wrote that once investors pass the October 6 anniversary of bitcoin’s prior all-time high, an overshoot toward $126,000 before year-end “may be possible.”

Kendrick’s call is a research view. Not a trading-desk signal. Traders, as ever, disagree.