Vision 2030 and Web3: what is really happening in Saudi Arabia

Search "Vision 2030 crypto" and you get two kinds of stories: breathless pieces about Saudi Arabia becoming a blockchain superpower, and dismissive ones that still quote the 2018 warning as if nothing had moved. Both miss what is actually on the record. The Kingdom has built one of the fastest-growing fintech sectors in the region, invited Animoca Brands, The Sandbox and Outlier Ventures to found a Web3 alliance in Riyadh, run two wholesale digital-currency experiments through its central bank, and talked publicly about regulated stablecoins. What it has not done is license a single exchange to sell Bitcoin to the public.

This page separates the verified items from the noise. Every deal, number and date below comes from the parties' own announcements or from primary business press, and where a deal's completion is unconfirmed we say so. We also leave out what cannot be verified: there is no documented crypto exposure at the Public Investment Fund, and Saudi Aramco called the 2021 "Bitcoin mining" reports false. If you came here to understand whether any of this changes how you buy crypto from Riyadh, Jeddah or Dammam, the answer is at the end, and it is shorter than you might hope.

The short answer

Vision 2030 is the economic diversification programme launched in 2016. One of its arms, the Financial Sector Development Program, set a target of 525 fintech companies by the end of the decade and pushed the Saudi Central BankSAMAThe Saudi Central Bank, which licenses banks, payment companies and open-banking providers and runs the Kingdom's payment systems. and the Capital Market AuthorityCMAThe Capital Market Authority, the securities regulator that chairs the Standing Committee behind the 2018 virtual-currency warning and runs the FinTech Lab for tokenised securities. to open sandboxes, licence digital banks and publish an open-banking framework. That is the fintech story, and it is real and measurable.

The Web3Web3A loose label for internet services built on public blockchains: tokens, NFTs, blockchain games and decentralised apps. It overlaps with crypto but is broader. story sits beside it rather than inside it. It consists of a private-sector alliance, a research hub plan with the King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology (KACST), a NEOM fund term sheet, a Riyadh-based Sharia-compliant startup and a few bank pilots. None of these items is a regulation, and none creates a path for a retail exchange to get a Saudi licence. The legal position is unchanged: crypto is not prohibited for individuals but it is unregulated, and nobody is licensed to intermediate it inside the Kingdom.

The fintech numbers behind the headlines

The clearest evidence that the programme works is the licence count. Fintech Saudi, the SAMA- and CMA-backed initiative that tracks the sector, counted 147 active companies in 2022, 216 at the end of 2023 and 261 at the end of 2024. Of those 261, 138 were licensed by SAMA, 52 by the CMA and 14 by the Insurance Authority, the rest operating under sandbox or enabling permits. The count passed 300 by the end of 2025, and the SAMA governor cited 371 companies by the end of August 2026, still short of the 525 target but on a steep curve.

Three things in that list matter to a crypto user. First, SAMA has shown it can license new categories quickly: stc pay became stc bank under a 2021 Council of Ministers decision, and from March 2026 SAMA began formally licensing open-banking providers, with Lean Technologies the first Major Payment Institution. Second, the rails you use for P2P trading, instant bank transfers through SARIESARIEThe Saudi instant interbank transfer system used by every local bank for riyal transfers., STC Pay and urpay, are products of this same push. Third, and this is the limit: not one of the 371 is a crypto exchange. The licence categories are payments, lending, insurance, open banking, robo-advice and capital-market services. A retail VASPVASPVirtual asset service provider: the FATF term for exchanges, brokers and custodians that handle crypto for customers. Saudi Arabia has no licence category for them. licence does not exist.

Web3: the alliance, NEOM and KACST

The most visible item is the Web3 Alliance of Saudi Arabia, launched at LEAP in Riyadh in February 2025 by three well-known names: The Sandbox (the metaverse game studio), Animoca Brands (its Hong Kong parent and one of the biggest Web3 investors) and Outlier Ventures (a London accelerator). It is a non-profit with a ten-member board based in the Kingdom, including Dr. Abeer Al Humaimeedy, Yasser Alobaidan and Stephan Apel, and four stated pillars: education, standards, networking and research. No funding figure was announced. Read it as an industry body that wants to shape the eventual rules, not as a sign that rules exist.

The money story is older. On 31 October 2023 the NEOM Investment Fund and Animoca Brands announced a USD 50 million convertible-notes term sheet, with Animoca to help NEOM build Web3 digital infrastructure deployed first in Riyadh and NEOM. That was a term sheet, and we could not find confirmation of a final closing on either party's pages, so treat the USD 50 million as announced rather than invested. Then in April 2024 the Outer Edge Riyadh summit, presented by KACST at The Garage startup campus with Animoca as main sponsor, put a physical Web3 hub in Riyadh on the agenda: a KACST–Animoca partnership covering research in Web3, blockchain, gaming and AI for local startups.

Smaller but real: Takadao, headquartered in Riyadh with a Singapore holding company, builds Sharia-compliant blockchain products (Takaturn, a rotating savings tool, and Takasure, a takaful-style cover). It raised a USD 1.5 million seed round in November 2025 for USD 3.1 million in total, with an earlier pre-seed led by Tim Draper. It is not an exchange and does not offer trading. And at Money20/20 Middle East in September 2025, the venture firm STV and Wamid, the technology arm of the Saudi Exchange group, unveiled plans for the Kingdom's first private-asset trading platform; no launch date or licence status was given.

SAMA: Aber, mBridge and the stablecoin question

The central bank's interest is in wholesale digital currencyCBDCCentral bank digital currency: money issued by a central bank in digital form. Wholesale CBDCs are used only between banks; nothing buyable by the public came out of the Saudi projects., not in Bitcoin. Project Aber, a joint pilot with the Central Bank of the UAE announced in January 2019, tested a single dual-issued digital currency for cross-border settlement between banks and published its final report in November 2020. There was no live successor. In September 2022 SAMA appointed a virtual-assets and CBDC programme lead, a former Accenture executive, to run this work; whether the role still exists in the same form is not documented.

The second experiment was international. On 5 June 2024 SAMA joined the Bank for International Settlements' mBridge project as a participant in its minimum viable product platform, a multi-CBDC system for cross-border payments built with the central banks of China, Hong Kong, Thailand and the UAE. According to FT-sourced reports in September 2026, SAMA said it successfully completed its proof of concept on 13 May 2025 and is no longer a participating member. So the correct description today is "a completed trial", not "Saudi Arabia is on mBridge".

Then there are stablecoinsStablecoinA token designed to stay worth one unit of a fiat currency, usually the US dollar. USDT and USDC are the big ones; no riyal-pegged stablecoin has been authorised.. In early November 2025 Minister Majed Al-Hogail said the government, working with the CMA and SAMA, aims to introduce a regulatory framework for stablecoins "soon", in a speech that also cited cashless retail payments above 79%. Exchange executives welcomed it. As of our check no rulebook, consultation paper or licensed riyal stablecoin has appeared. The dollar stablecoin you use on P2P markets remains a foreign product with no Saudi standing.

The CMA and tokenised securities

The one regulator actually issuing blockchain-related permits is the CMA, and it is important to understand how narrow they are. The CMA's FinTech Lab has run since 2018 under Experimental Permit instructions amended in 2021. In June 2020 it granted Wethaq Capital Markets a permit to arrange sukuk offerings on distributed ledger technology, and in October 2022 it began accepting "security token" business models: shares, fund units and other instruments with the characteristics of traditional securities, recorded on a blockchain. Applicants must establish an entity in the Kingdom. This is tokenisationTokenisationRecording a conventional asset such as a share or a sukuk as a token on a blockchain. The regulated item is still the security; the token is just the record-keeping method. of regulated securities, not permission to run a crypto exchange, and it is the reason "the CMA regulates crypto" is a sentence you should not believe.

Banks are cautiously involved on the same terms. On 26 January 2026 Riyad Bank's digital arm Jeel signed a non-binding study agreement with Ripple covering payments, custody and tokenisation. It is a study, it is non-binding, and it does not put XRP into any Saudi bank product. When one of these pilots becomes a product you can open from your banking app, we will update this page; until then they are evidence of direction, not of availability.

Events worth knowing

If you want to see the ecosystem in person, three Riyadh and Jeddah dates recur every year. LEAP, the Kingdom's flagship technology show, moved from its usual spring slot to 31 August–3 September 2026 at the Riyadh Exhibition and Convention Centre in Malham; it is where the Web3 Alliance was launched. Money20/20 Middle East had its first Riyadh edition on 15–17 September 2025 with founding partners including Al Rajhi Bank, Riyad Bank, stc bank, SNB, Tamara and Visa, and returned on 14–16 September 2026, co-hosted by SAMA and the CMA with a projected 38,000 attendees and 350 exhibitors. Jeddah Fintech Week ran 16–17 November 2025 and again on 5–6 September 2026 at the Ritz-Carlton; it is the only recurring Saudi event whose programme explicitly names crypto trading ecosystems, Web3 finance and digital-asset compliance. Our Riyadh and Jeddah pages carry the local detail.

Treat all three as professional conferences. Nobody sells coins on the floor, and an exhibitor badge is not a licence. If someone invites you to a "private crypto investment session" on the sidelines of any of them, apply the checks on our scams page.

Beyond Riyadh: Medina and Dhahran

Two university ecosystems have a longer blockchain record than most people expect. In Medina, Taibah Valley, the innovation company of Taibah University, opened the region's first blockchain development lab in 2018 with New York's Blocktech, ran a cryptocurrency workshop with the NY Bitcoin Center the same year, and in March 2021 signed a memorandum with Saudi Aramco's entrepreneurship arm Wa'ed covering 16 startups, five of them blockchain companies. Its website is currently a relaunch page, so its present activity is unconfirmed. See our Medina page.

In the Eastern Province, KFUPM in Dhahran lists blockchain among its professional master's concentrations, and its alumni startup IR4LAB, which builds blockchain credential verification, received SAR 5.63 million from Wa'ed. Dhahran Techno Valley also runs Finspire, a fintech accelerator with SNB. This is talent and research, which is exactly what a future regulated market would draw on; the Dammam and Khobar page explains why residents there also look across the causeway to Bahrain's licensed exchanges.

Timeline of verified milestones

• 2018

  August: the CMA-chaired Standing Committee states that virtual currencies are not approved and nobody is licensed to deal in them. November: Taibah Valley opens a blockchain lab in Medina. The CMA's FinTech Lab starts taking applications.

• 2019

  January: SAMA and the UAE central bank announce Project Aber. February: SAMA launches its regulatory sandbox. August: the Ministry of Finance warns against "CryptoRiyal"-style tokens using the Kingdom's name. June: Saudi Arabia becomes a full FATF member.

• 2020

  June: the CMA grants Wethaq a permit for DLT-based sukuk. November: the Aber final report is published.

• 2021–2022

  June 2021: stc pay is licensed as stc bank. September 2022: SAMA appoints a virtual-assets and CBDC programme lead. October 2022: the CMA begins accepting security-token models in its FinTech Lab.

• 2023

  31 October: NEOM Investment Fund and Animoca Brands announce a USD 50 million convertible-notes term sheet (closing unconfirmed). Fintech count reaches 216.

• 2024

  April: Outer Edge Riyadh at The Garage, presented by KACST, with plans for a KACST–Animoca Web3 hub. 5 June: SAMA joins BIS mBridge. Year-end count: 261 fintechs.

• 2025

  February: Web3 Alliance of Saudi Arabia launched at LEAP. 13 May: SAMA completes its mBridge proof of concept. September: first Money20/20 Middle East in Riyadh; STV and Wamid announce a private-asset platform. November: stablecoin framework announced by Minister Al-Hogail; Takadao raises USD 1.5 million. Count passes 300.

• 2026

  January: Riyad Bank's Jeel signs a non-binding study with Ripple. March: SAMA formally licenses open-banking fintechs. May: Semafor reports The Line paused until after 2030, Oxagon continues. August–September: LEAP, Jeddah Fintech Week and Money20/20 in quick succession; the SAMA governor cites 371 fintechs.

What all this means for a retail reader

Here is the honest translation. Vision 2030 has made the plumbing excellent: instant transfers, open banking, a digital-bank licence for stc pay and a payments market where more than 85% of retail transactions are electronic. That plumbing is what lets you pay a P2P seller on Binance or Bybit in seconds, and it is why a Saudi Visa or Apple Pay purchase on CEX.IO settles in minutes. The Web3 alliance, the KACST hub and the Riyadh conferences mean the people who will eventually write the rules are in the room with the people who will have to follow them.

What it has not changed is your legal footing. No platform holds a Saudi licence, so there is no Saudi investor protection, no local complaints route and no deposit guarantee; your protection is the exchange's own security and your own self-custody. CEX.IO, for example, has operated since 2013 and serves Saudi users through CEX OVRS LLC, with group companies registered with FinCEN in the US and the FCA in the UK; that is a statement about its compliance culture, not about a Saudi permit, and the same caveat applies to Binance, Bybit and OKX. Prices can fall as fast as they rise, and nothing on this page should be read as a prediction that a Saudi licence will arrive by a given date.

Our practical advice is unchanged by the headlines: start small, compare the eight exchanges that actually serve Saudi residents, learn the basics before you fund anything, and keep an eye on the CMA and SAMA websites rather than on Telegram for news of a framework. When a real one lands, it will be published at cma.gov.sa and sama.gov.sa first, not announced by a coin.

Frequently asked questions

Sources and references

1. Zawya — Web3 Alliance of Saudi Arabia launches at LEAP 2025
2. Entrepreneur — Animoca Brands and NEOM Investment Fund USD 50m term sheet (31 Oct 2023)
3. Unlock Blockchain — Outer Edge Riyadh, KACST and Animoca (Apr 2024)
4. Argaam — 261 active fintechs at end-2024 (Fintech Saudi)
5. Fintech News Middle East — Saudi fintech surpasses 300 players
6. Arab News — Saudi fintech sector grows to 371 companies (SAMA governor)
7. The Fintech Times — Money20/20 Middle East returns to Riyadh (14–16 Sep 2026)
8. SAMA — joins the BIS mBridge project (Jun 2024)
9. Cointelegraph — SAMA completed its mBridge proof of concept and exited (Sep 2026)
10. Semafor — NEOM pauses The Line until after 2030 (May 2026)
11. Wamda — Takadao raises USD 1.5m seed (Nov 2025)
12. CMA — Standing Committee statement on virtual currencies (2018)

Related pages

• Is crypto legal?What SAMA and the CMA actually say
• Tabuk & NEOMThe megaprojects
• RiyadhCapital and financial centre
• Best exchanges8 platforms that serve Saudi residents, compared
• ScamsCommon fraud patterns and how to stay safe
• MiningIs mining allowed and is it worth it?