UAE’s move to regulate crypto payments in real estate transactions should see early success given the sector is already quite well-regulated, according to a top lawyer.
Read the full story here: https://gulfnews.com/business/property/uaes-property-agents-can-easily-adapt-to-rules-on-crypto-backed-deals-says-lawyer-1.89888639
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#UAEnews #realestate #crypto
Read the full story here: https://gulfnews.com/business/property/uaes-property-agents-can-easily-adapt-to-rules-on-crypto-backed-deals-says-lawyer-1.89888639
See more videos at https://gulfnews.com/videos
Read more Gulf News stories here: https://bit.ly/2HLJ2km
Subscribe to Gulf News on YouTube and watch more of our videos: https://www.youtube.com/user/GulfNewsTV
#UAEnews #realestate #crypto
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NewsTranscript
00:00Crypto was virtually non-existent 10 years ago, and then all of a sudden it became very relevant,
00:06especially after COVID. During and after COVID, because it went up so much,
00:11everyone started trading crypto and people accumulated wealth through crypto. So they
00:16were in a situation where they had all that crypto wealth and some of them, realising that
00:21crypto is not going to be good forever, wanted to transform part of this wealth into real estate
00:26or other assets. But unfortunately, Dubai didn't have the right exchanges back then
00:32to accommodate these requests, and therefore a lot of these crypto traders,
00:39these de facto crypto traders, started using off-the-counter trading services,
00:45which are basically trading companies located in Dera or somewhere else in Dubai that have
00:51high turnover and they can justify receiving crypto outside of Dubai and changing it into
00:58real money in Dubai. Then that real money was used to buy real estate, to invest in
01:04company startups or whatever. But in reality, what was happening is that little by little,
01:09some of these trading houses were getting the attention and getting flagged by the central bank,
01:14which has led to them being investigated. So you as a bona fide third party who had a crypto wallet,
01:21who didn't have the infrastructure needed to transform it into real money, who then went to
01:27one of the off-counters, put a deposit on a property, issued a banker's cheque. Your whole
01:33transaction was jeopardised and this has probably led to you losing your money, because by the time
01:38the central bank clamped down on these traders, the bank's cheques they've issued became
01:46on hold. And even if you had booked a property and paid for it through a banker's cheque,
01:55which is normally always honoured, because it's not a normal cheque, it's guaranteed by the bank,
02:00this came at a higher level. It is the prosecutor who said, with the central bank,
02:05all the transactions related to that trading house need to be stopped. Between then and now,
02:10between 2020 and today, a lot of the big crypto exchange houses have been licensed or are in the
02:17process of getting licensed in Dubai. This means that you no longer have to go through the shady
02:23route of the off-the-counter exchange to get your crypto traded. So you can do it safely.
02:40you