Saudi Arabia: Vision 2030 Meets Digital Assets — Cautious Digitalisation

Saudi Arabia’s relationship with digital assets cannot be understood without reference to Vision 2030 — the economic diversification and modernisation agenda that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has made the defining framework of Saudi economic policy. Vision 2030’s financial sector goals include developing capital markets, attracting foreign investment, and digitalising financial services. Against this backdrop, the question of crypto and digital asset regulation becomes not merely a financial stability question but a question about the pace and nature of Saudi economic transformation.

And yet Saudi crypto regulation has remained cautious — more cautious than its Gulf neighbour UAE, more cautious than some Vision 2030 aspirations might suggest, and operating within constraints that Vision 2030’s rhetoric does not always acknowledge openly.

The Regulatory Architecture

Saudi Arabia divides financial regulation between two principal bodies. The Saudi Central Bank (SAMA — Saudi Arabia Monetary Authority, retaining its historical acronym) regulates banks, payment service providers, and monetary policy. The Capital Market Authority (CMA) regulates the securities markets, investment funds, and listed companies. The overlap and coordination between them for crypto is a recurring governance question.

SAMA’s position has been consistently cautious. In 2018, SAMA issued warnings against crypto trading, characterising Bitcoin as a speculative and risky asset not subject to regulatory oversight. These warnings were not legal prohibitions — they did not criminalise crypto holding or trading — but they created a regulatory environment of uncertainty that discouraged domestic financial institutions from engaging with crypto.

The CMA has approached the question from a securities regulation perspective. In 2021, the CMA issued regulations for investment products and services in financial technology — a sandbox framework within which FinTech firms, including those working with digital assets, could test services under regulatory supervision. The sandbox approach is characteristic of how Saudi Arabia has engaged with crypto: not prohibition, not full authorisation, but supervised experimentation.

Vision 2030 and Financial Sector Goals

Vision 2030’s financial sector targets include increasing the depth and sophistication of Saudi capital markets, developing Riyadh as a regional financial centre, attracting global investment management firms to establish Saudi operations, and digitalising financial services at both retail and institutional levels.

The Public Investment Fund (PIF), Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund and the primary vehicle for Vision 2030 investments, is among the world’s largest, with assets exceeding $700 billion. The PIF has made large investments in technology companies, entertainment, sports, and real estate globally. Its digital infrastructure investments include stakes in significant technology platforms. The PIF’s investment horizon and risk appetite are substantial — this is an institution willing to make large bets on transformative technology.

Yet the PIF’s appetite for technology investments has not translated into Saudi Arabia hosting the region’s leading crypto exchange or tokenization platform. The regulatory framework for domestic crypto businesses remains underdeveloped compared to the Dubai International Financial Centre or Abu Dhabi Global Market in the UAE. This gap reflects the constraint that Vision 2030’s ambitious goals operate within.

Project Aber: The CBDC Experiment

The most concrete Saudi Arabia digital currency initiative is Project Aber — a wholesale central bank digital currency project conducted jointly by SAMA and the UAE Central Bank, completed and reported on in 2020. Aber used distributed ledger technology to settle interbank payments between Saudi and UAE financial institutions, demonstrating that a cross-border wholesale CBDC could function technically and reduce settlement costs and time.

The Aber report concluded that the technology was viable, that regulatory concerns were manageable, and that a production system could be built. This was a meaningful technical milestone: two Gulf central banks demonstrating operational capability with DLT-based cross-border settlement. The report was widely cited internationally as evidence that central bank CBDC projects could deliver practical results.

However, Aber did not progress from pilot to production deployment. The transition from technical proof-of-concept to a live central bank settlement system involves governance questions — who controls the infrastructure, how disputes are resolved, how the system is audited — that extend beyond technical design. As of early 2026, Aber remains a completed pilot rather than operational infrastructure.

Islamic Finance Considerations

Saudi Arabia’s financial regulatory environment operates within an Islamic finance framework. Sharia law applies to financial transactions in Saudi Arabia, with the Sharia Supervisory Board providing religious guidance on financial products. Islamic finance principles prohibit riba (interest), excessive gharar (uncertainty), and maysir (gambling or speculation) — principles that create interpretive challenges for crypto assets.

Scholarly opinion on crypto within Islamic finance has been divided. Some scholars have held that Bitcoin and similar cryptocurrencies are impermissible because they have no intrinsic value, facilitate speculation, and are associated with illicit activities. Others have argued that crypto can be permissible if used for legitimate transactions, noting that modern fiat currencies also lack intrinsic commodity backing.

SAMA has not issued definitive Sharia guidance on crypto — that question has been left to scholars and individuals. But the Islamic finance context creates an additional layer of institutional caution that does not exist in secular financial regulatory environments. A Saudi regulatory decision to fully embrace crypto would require at minimum acknowledgment of the Islamic finance questions, and ideally coordination with religious authorities.

Comparison With the UAE’s More Aggressive Strategy

The contrast with the United Arab Emirates is the most instructive comparison for Saudi Arabia’s crypto posture. Dubai’s Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority (VARA) has issued comprehensive crypto regulation and attracted major global exchanges — Binance, Bybit, OKX — to establish regional headquarters in Dubai. Abu Dhabi Global Market has its own digital asset framework. The UAE has positioned itself explicitly as the region’s crypto hub.

Saudi Arabia has watched this UAE strategy carefully. There is genuine internal debate within Saudi government about whether to compete directly with UAE for crypto business — establishing Riyadh as an alternative regional hub — or to focus Saudi regulatory energy on financial digitalisation more broadly while letting UAE absorb the crypto industry that wants a Gulf base.

The Riyadh-based Financial Sector Development Programme, a Vision 2030 initiative, has included digital finance as a development priority. Saudi Arabia has hosted international FinTech events and invested in FinTech infrastructure. But the regulatory framework for domestic crypto business has not matched this ambition with equivalent legal clarity.

Whether Saudi Arabia eventually develops a comprehensive crypto regulatory framework — moving beyond sandbox experiments toward a full VASP licensing regime — depends on political decisions about how directly to compete with UAE and how to resolve the domestic constraints that have produced caution to date. Vision 2030’s deadline and the ambitions it embeds make continued regulatory inaction increasingly difficult to sustain.