It was sometime in 2015, on a hiking trail in Hong Kong, that the perpetual swap — also called a perpetual future or a “perp” for short — was born. Ben Delo, the mathematician and co-founder of BitMEX, was walking with a friend called Bavik, a derivatives trader, wrestling with a problem that had been nagging at him for months.

BitMEX had been trying everything. Quarterly futures, monthly futures, weekly futures, 48-hour futures, even a contract that lasted just 24 hours before resetting. Nothing was working. Customers kept complaining that their positions were closing without warning. They wanted something that looked like spot, traded like spot, but gave them the leverage that only a derivatives exchange could offer.

“What if a future never expired?” Delo asked.

Bavik’s answer was immediate. “Mathematically, it would be worth infinity,” Delo recalls him saying.

Technically, he was right. A futures contract’s value is partly derived from the time remaining until expiry and the cost of carrying the position. Remove the expiry date and that carrying cost compounds indefinitely, making the theoretical value infinite. But then Bavik offered a solution: just charge traders the bitcoin overnight rate, the way you might charge LIBOR (London Interbank Offered Rate) in traditional finance.

There was one problem. “I said, what’s that?” Delo recalls. “He said, ‘Hm, just charge them the overnight bitcoin interest rate’. I said, ‘I don’t think that exists.’”

So Delo built it. And in doing so, he invented one of the most consequential financial products of the 21st century.

Building BitMEX

To understand why the perpetual swap mattered, you have to understand what BitMEX was trying to be before it became the most liquid bitcoin market in the world.

When Delo and Arthur Hayes founded the exchange in 2014, they were not thinking about retail traders chasing 100x leverage. They were thinking about institutional hedgers. Hayes had worked at Deutsche Bank, while Delo spent years building high-frequency trading systems at JP Morgan. Their thesis was that bitcoin miners and payment companies needed a way to hedge their exposure, and BitMEX would provide the professional infrastructure to do it.

“We built it basically to look like a Bloomberg terminal,” Delo said. “We used Reuters instruction codes. Z14 meant expiring December 2014.”

The institutions never came. What came instead were traders, sophisticated but retail, people who had financial experience but were playing with their own money. And what they wanted was not guaranteed settlement or low leverage. They wanted to speculate, and they wanted to do it with as much size and leverage as possible.

BitMEX listened. By Halloween 2015, the exchange was offering 100x leverage, made possible by a real-time margining system that Delo had built from scratch. “I built the order matching engine, the position keeping system, the margining system, the PnL system, the settlement system,” he says. “Everything on that was me.”

The issue with futures, even short-dated ones, is basis, the premium at which a futures contract trades above the spot price of the underlying asset. A futures contract trades at a premium to the underlying asset, and that premium reflects an implied interest rate. In traditional finance, this is well understood. In crypto, in 2015, it confused almost everyone.

“Our customers would be like, why is bitcoin so expensive on your exchange?” Delo recalled “And we would say, ‘Well, if it is expensive, why don’t you short it?’ And that would blow some of their minds. You could short something rather than just long it.”

BitMEX kept shortening the expiry of its listed futures contracts. Weekly futures. Then 48-hour. Then a contract that relisted every single day.

“Every 24 hours, it would expire or settle. And people would say, ‘Why did you liquidate me?’ And we’d say, ‘We didn’t liquidate you. Your position closed at the index price. You got exactly the spot price,’” Delo said. “They’re like, ‘We don’t understand.’”

The customers knew what they wanted, even if they could not articulate it. They wanted a leveraged product that never went away. Delo’s hiking trail conversation gave him the framework to build one.

Inventing the funding rate

The perpetual swap launched in May 2016 with little ceremony. The core mechanic was straightforward: a futures contract with no expiry date, anchored to the spot price through a daily funding rate. Longs paid shorts, or vice versa, depending on whether the swap was trading above or below spot. BitMEX took no cut. The rate was purely a balancing mechanism.

The early funding rate was derived from third-party lending markets, primarily Bitfinex, where traders could borrow dollars or lend out Bitcoin. Take the dollar borrow rate, subtract the Bitcoin borrow rate, and you had something approximating the cost of holding a long position.

It worked, until it did not. As Bitcoin began its rise through 2016 and into 2017, demand for long exposure on BitMEX overwhelmed the funding mechanism. The swap started trading at a persistent premium to spot, causing the contract price to drift away from the actual price of bitcoin and undermining the mechanism designed to keep them aligned. The interest rate being imported from Bitfinex was simply not high enough to reflect what was happening on BitMEX itself.

“We had to dynamically adjust how we calculated that funding rate,” Delo said.

The original funding rate had been imported from external lending markets, a fixed reference point that could not respond to conditions on BitMEX itself. The new approach replaced that with a dynamic one, looking inward at how the swap was actually trading rather than outward at what Bitfinex was charging to borrow dollars.

The solution was elegant. Rather than looking outward to other markets, BitMEX would look inward. The exchange began measuring how far the swap was trading above or below spot over an eight-hour window, treating that gap as an implied basis, and back-calculating the annualized rate from it. That rate would then be charged at the end of the next eight-hour window.

“This was very important because you gave market makers notice of how you were calculating it, what it would be, and then when you would charge it,” Delo said. “Because it was paid from longs to shorts, if the swap was trading at a 1% premium, you would charge longs 1% but give 1% to shorts. And then immediately the market makers, knowing that, would come in, short the swap, and anchor it back down to the spot price. It was a dynamic equilibrium.”

This is, in essence, the funding rate mechanism that every major derivatives exchange in the world now uses.

The product that took over

By 2017, BitMEX was the most liquid bitcoin market on the planet. The exchange was processing $3-4 billion a day, and the perpetual swap was at the center of it all. Price discovery for bitcoin was happening not on Coinbase or Bitstamp but on the BitMEX order book.

The concentration of liquidity was itself a product of the swap’s design. Before it launched, BitMEX had been running quarterly, monthly, weekly, 48-hour and 24-hour contracts simultaneously, spreading market maker capital thin across six different tenors. The swap collapsed all of that into one instrument.

“By offering one product, they [traders] were able to consolidate their liquidity, which meant a more liquid market, tighter spreads,” Delo said.

Competitors noticed. Another competitor exchange copied so literally that it reproduced portions of the BitMEX FAQ without understanding how the product worked, Delo told CoinDesk. Others took the concept more seriously. Eventually, every major exchange in crypto offered its own perpetual swap, each one built on the funding rate architecture that Delo had begun assembling on that Hong Kong hiking trail.

“The fact that every other exchange has copied the swap just proves what a financial innovation it is,” he said. “I think it now does $40, 50 trillion dollars a year of turnover. It’s one of the most successful products in the history of capitalism.”

What comes next

BitMEX chose not to patent the perpetual swap. Delo says they considered it and decided the startup’s time was better spent building.

“We were a scrappy startup,” he says. “We thought, just get it out there. If it was any good, the market would show us.”

And show them the market did. Now, a decade on, the product is starting to attract the attention of traditional finance regulators. The CFTC is reportedly making room for perpetual swaps under its framework, and there is speculation that the CME could eventually list them on equities.

For Delo, that prospect is the final validation of something that started as a question on a hillside above Hong Kong, asked by someone who had grown tired of watching his customers complain about positions that kept disappearing.

“I think once traditional finance sees the benefits of this financial product,” he said, “it’ll be impressive.”

“Investments change fast; human nature and human aspirations stay constant.”

That’s how Meir Statman, behavioral finance pioneer and professor of finance at Santa Clara University, explains one of investing’s oldest puzzles. And it may be why every crypto cycle so far has been about chasing the next hot narrative rather than fundamentals, whether its DeFi, meme coins or decentralized compute.

In an industry that has spent years maturing into an ecosystem of institutional investors, revenue-generating protocols and real-world use cases, investor attention still gravitates toward the next shiny thing that can offer the promise of outsized returns.

“Crypto is still a young asset class, and price discovery in young markets tends to be driven by attention before it’s driven by analysis,” Samar Sen, head of international markets at Talos, tells Magazine.

“A new narrative gives investors a simple story to underwrite quickly, while assessing the fundamentals of an established protocol takes real work, from understanding usage and revenue to token design and competitive position.”

This behavior isn’t unique to digital assets; it’s just particularly pronounced in an industry that prizes memes over sustainable business models.

A Pokémon card, a digital asset and a tech stock

A recent MarketWise study compared hypothetical $10,000 investments across cryptocurrencies, stocks, exchange-traded funds and collectibles between January 2021 and April 2026.

The study found that a sealed Pokémon card box outperformed Bitcoin, while a pair of limited-edition sneakers nearly matched Dogecoin’s returns.

At the same time, some of Wall Street’s most popular artificial intelligence funds lagged the broader stock market despite AI dominating the investment headlines.

A $10K investment has very different outcomes. Source: MarketWise

What does a Pokémon card, a digital asset and a tech stock have in common? According to Statman, they’re driven by the same thing: investors aren’t simply looking for the best asset; they’re buying a lottery ticket to a life-changing outcome.

Investors are chasing transformation, not crypto

Traditional finance tends to assume that investors want to maximize returns while minimizing risk, but Statman argues that people often invest for a very different reason.

In an unpublished paper shared with Magazine, Statman argues that many investors mentally divide their wealth into two layers.

The first is a “not-poor” layer, which is designed to preserve their standard of living and avoid falling into poverty. The second is a “be-rich” layer, which is for transformative goals, like buying a house, becoming financially independent, or fundamentally changing their circumstances.

Within that framework, concentrated investments aren’t necessarily irrational; they exist because diversified investing, while statistically sensible, may never offer someone with limited capital a realistic chance of achieving those goals.

James Royal, a senior writer at MarketWise, tells Magazine:

“The asset class may change, but the behavior barely does… Investors aren’t exactly loyal to crypto, stocks or collectibles. Their loyalty is to whatever promises lucrative returns next.”

Statman says that, while some of today’s investors pin their hopes on meme stocks, “a century ago it was railroad stocks […] today’s investors are simply expressing the same aspirations through a new asset class.”

Investors aren’t becoming more tolerant of risk, however, just more willing to accept volatility for a chance of life-changing wealth.

“Investors aren’t necessarily on the hunt for risk, but they’ve got a case of FOMO on the next life-changing return, and that can lead them down a path of underestimated downside risk,” Royal says.

Why stories beat fundamentals

If investors are searching for transformation rather than simple returns, that helps explain why narratives so often overwhelm fundamentals, particularly in crypto.

The decentralized finance sector is a case in point. Despite some of its largest protocols like Aave or Uniswap generating substantial revenue, attracting billions of dollars in deposits and processing enormous trading volumes, their tokens struggle to capture the same excitement as newer narratives built around the latest craze.

Aave’s token was trading at around $98 at the time of writing, some 85% from its 2021 peak, but its TVL is over $14 billion, and had reached over $37 billion at the height of the bull market in October 2025.

Aave’s TVL is over $14 billion while its token price is 85% from its 2021 peak. Source: DeFiLlama.

Thomas Probst, a research analyst at Kaiko market data provider, says that while assets may outperform in the short term, fundamentals will always be more important in the long term.

“Market fundamentals continue to play an important role, particularly resilience, liquidity, and volatility… [an asset’s] ability to establish itself over time also depends on the robustness of its market structure,” he says.

Yet, while a mature protocol generating sustainable cash flow may be an attractive long-term investment, it offers little appeal to investors allocating money toward their “be-rich” bucket. A token that might double over several years will always struggle to compete with the possibility, however remote, of a 100x moonshot.

“Investors like to confuse a great technological breakthrough with a great investment opportunity,” Royal says, which might explain why many AI-focused ETFs have underperformed, despite AI arguably becoming the defining investment narrative of our time.

“The real skill isn’t identifying exciting investments, it’s recognizing when optimism has already been priced in.”

That same skill comes in handy with market timing. MarketWise’s report found that investors who bought Bitcoin in January 2021 turned a hypothetical $10,000 investment into more than $24,000 by April 2026, with +141% gains.

Those who bought during its cycle peak in October 2025, however, saw the same investment shrink to just over $6,000 with a -38% return by April (and it’d be worth about $5,000 today).

Anyone who FOMO’d into AAAVE around the same time would be sitting on +85% losses today.

Institutions play a different game

Institutional investors approach investing from an entirely different perspective, Sen says:

“Institutional mandates simply don’t allow for chasing outsized, speculative returns. Institutions are underwriting risk-adjusted performance, liquidity, custody arrangements and operational resilience long before they look at upside potential.”

AAVE’s price performance since 2021. Source: Coingecko

And while that doesn’t mean institutions are immune to emerging narratives, they generally look at whether the underlying infrastructure can support meaningful capital allocation rather than whether the token could 100x.

“It’s usually a mix, and the order matters,” Sen says. “Most of these themes, DeFi, AI, memecoins, do start with a genuine shift: a real technical unlock or a new use case that wasn’t possible before.”

Once the narrative begins attracting speculative money, however, prices often move faster than fundamentals, he says.

“Investors arriving later in a cycle are often responding to the narrative as much as the fundamentals that started it […] Institutional capital, which tends to move on process and discipline rather than trend-following, is often a step behind the initial narrative and a step ahead of the correction.”

The next Bitcoin isn’t really the point

The search for the next life-changing investment is unlikely to disappear, and neither, Statman argues, is the human desire to improve one’s circumstances.

The next 100x token certainly exists, and investors will continue to seek it — even when the odds and fundamentals say they’re looking in the wrong place.

Magazine: The real reason DeFi projects that survived 2022 crash are shutting down now

Strategy executive chairman Michael Saylor has warned that any changes to Bitcoin’s consensus rules pose a far greater threat than those posed by rival cryptocurrencies and external governments.

Saylor’s comments are likely part of his broader opposition to Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP-110), a temporary soft fork that reduces arbitrary data stored on the blockchain.

Strategy Issues Bitcoin Warning

Michael Saylor issued the warning in a series of X posts, calling Bitcoin’s rules its constitution and describing how they determine ownership, scarcity, settlements, and what participants can and can’t change. Saylor stated,

“Bitcoin has won. Now it must survive victory. Its gravest threat is not an enemy at the gates, but corruption from within: factions that invent pretexts, rewrite the rules, and seize economic rights until freedom becomes permission and law becomes loot.”

According to Saylor, any changes to the protocol to benefit a single group would infringe upon the economic rights of the broader community, including miners, developers, investors, companies, custodians, and other users. He warned that if one group gained enough influence to change Bitcoin’s rules, others could use the same process for similar agendas.

Prolonged Governance Conflicts Harm Bitcoin

According to Saylor, protocol changes driven by a particular group could prolong disputes, which would drive away capital, slow development, and weaken security. Saylor has predicted Bitcoin could grow exponentially and become part of the infrastructure supporting global markets. The Strategy founder believes a poorly thought-out rule could hamper financial products and technologies in the future.

Saylor’s Opposition to BIP-110

If Saylor’s comments seem targeted, it’s because they are. Saylor has vehemently opposed BIP-110, a soft fork that reduces the arbitrary data stored on the blockchain. Supporters of the fork believe that limiting certain types of data eases storage requirements and reduces the burden on node operators. Additionally, they believe Bitcoin must focus on monetary transactions instead of tokens, inscriptions, or file storage.

While Saylor concedes that some on-chain data is redundant or could be linked to malicious activities, he argues that Bitcoin can’t use consensus rules to restrict block space to valid, fee-paying transactions. Saylor had said in an article dated July 18,

“Bitcoin does not need guardians of purity. It needs guardians of neutrality.”

Saylor’s latest comments also criticize proposals to add covenant functionality and increase block capacity, arguing that they create risks for Bitcoin’s base layer. Saylor is not the only one opposing BIP-110, with Adam Beck also publicly opposing the soft fork.

Fee Market and Network Security at Risk

Saylor believes imposing restrictions on valid transactions could weaken the fee market by reducing competition for block space, while larger blocks could reduce block space scarcity and raise bandwidth and hardware costs for node operators. He also argued that covenants could make Bitcoin’s consensus rules complicated and introduce new attack surfaces.

Saylor also warned that suppressing fee demand could substantially lower miner income, impacting the financial incentive that protects the network. He believes the base layer must be kept simple, neutral, scarce, and secure, while developers can build new functionality on a separate layer.

The Bitcoin Security Consortium

Strategy, along with Anchorage Digital, ARK Invest, BlackRock, Block, Blockstream, Coinbase, Fidelity Digital Assets, and Galaxy, has formed a consortium called the Bitcoin Security Consortium. The consortium has pledged $15 million over three years to support Bitcoin developers working on post-quantum solutions. However, the consortium will not take any position on protocol changes, nor control Bitcoin development.

Disclaimer: This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

Perpetual futures are entering regulated markets, and the objection to them is serious: retail-driven, high-leverage instruments will import systemic risk. But the critique is aimed at the wrong target. Systemic risk in a derivatives market is a property of the venue on which the perpetuals are traded, not the contract. The risk is set by venue choices: leverage caps, margin, funding design, default management. None inherent to a no-expiry contract.

The concern isn’t baseless. Crypto’s sharpest deleveraging episodes — with the October 2025 cascade among the most recent — have many causes: macro shocks, stablecoin de-pegs, exchange outages, oracle failures, over-leverage and thin liquidity. What turns a sell-off into a systemic event is the risk transmission mechanism, and in crypto that is usually the liquidation cascade: forced liquidations depress prices, transmit to other venues through shared reference pricing and arbitrage, and trigger more liquidations. What makes the cascade violent are venue choices: a manipulable index that liquidates on false prices, and auto-deleveraging that claws back profitable trades to cover a shortfall. Neither is a feature of perpetuals.

So the real question is not whether perpetuals belong in regulated markets; it is how a given venue is built. Regulatory requirements are necessary to secure the baseline: segregated funds, a registered clearing entity, a supervisor’s oversight. How a venue handles a default under stress is a separate choice, and it varies even inside the regulated perimeter.

There’s a sharper objection worth taking seriously, and it isn’t about risk: maybe institutions don’t want perpetuals at all. A recent JPMorgan note found limited institutional appetite for perpetuals, treating them as speculative rather than a replacement for regulated futures – no term structure, and basis risk that makes them imperfect substitutes. That is correct when it comes to the mechanics: as a substitute for dated futures, perpetuals fall short. Unlike a futures basis, funding is variable and can’t be locked in; and for a hedger who needs term structure and delivery, they are the wrong tool.

But replacement is not how institutions reach for them. Running both an options market and a perpetual one, Bullish sees it firsthand: many of the institutions trading options on our venue use perpetuals to hedge delta (the options’ directional exposure to the underlying’s price), not as a stand-in for dated futures, but because that is where the liquidity is. Term structure is less relevant to delta hedging than liquidity. Many of crypto’s dated futures are thinly-traded, while perpetuals — liquid in part because of the retail flow their critics deride — are the deepest, most continuously tradable delta-one instruments available. A desk managing risk in real time takes execution over elegance.

And that liquidity edge is structural. Retail gravitates to perpetuals for what they are: no expiry, no roll, continuously tradable. The design that draws that flow concentrates liquidity in perpetuals. That is the overlooked prize in bringing perpetuals onshore: a deep, durable pool of liquidity in the instruments a hedging desk wants.

So the two halves of the debate are one. The liquidity institutions want already exists, drawn in large part by retail. What lets them use it safely is institutional-grade default management, the same thing that contains the systemic risk the critics fear.

The question was never “are perpetuals dangerous?” It is “when the market is under stress, how does a venue handle a default?” Regulated clearing has established the standard for decades, which is also the standard Bullish is building toward, having filed with the CFTC to operate as a regulated contract market and clearinghouse.

When a liquidation’s shortfall outruns the insurance fund, the backstop is to socialize losses: auto-deleveraging force-closes offsetting profitable positions at an off-market price in order to absorb the defaulter’s loss. The clearing model works differently. It starts with the defaulter, whose own margin and fund contribution absorb the first loss. The position is worked off through the order book or, if large, auctioned to other clearing members. Behind that sits a pre-funded guaranty fund sized to regulated clearinghouse standards, with broad loss-sharing only beyond that, and rarely.

None of this completely eliminates risk – nothing does. What it does is break the chain that turns one blown-out account into a market-wide cascade: a default absorbed at its source, not force-fed into a falling market. That is the difference between a venue that contains a failure and one that transmits it, and the transmission is the systemic risk the critics fear. Meet that standard and perpetuals become infrastructure institutions can use; miss it and we have the hazard critics describe, regulated or not. Perpetuals were never the whole story. The design is.

Emirates, the Dubai-based flagship carrier, has launched Crypto.com Pay on its website and app, enabling eligible United Arab Emirates residents make flight bookings with cryptocurrencies, the airline said Tuesday.

Mobile users are sent to the Crypto.com app to authorize payment from their wallet, while desktop customers scan a QR code at checkout, the companies said in an announcement. Emirates settles in UAE dirhams rather than holding crypto, with Crypto.com handling the conversion.

The move “reflects the rapidly evolving preferences of a younger, digitally fluent generation who manage their money and plan their journeys primarily from their phones,” said Adnan Kazim, Emirates’ deputy president and chief commercial officer. Neither company indicated whether they would expand the Emirates service beyond eligible UAE residents.

The launch implements a partnership announced in July 2025. Cointelegraph reported in May that Crypto.com had received a UAE central bank Stored Value Facilities (SVF) license, which the company said at the time could support integrations with Emirates and Dubai Duty Free.

An SVF license allows non-bank companies to hold customers’ money or crypto in a digital wallet and process payments under central bank oversight. It lets customers fund payments with cryptocurrencies while merchants receive dirhams or approved dirham-backed stablecoins.

According to CoinGecko, Crypto.com handled around $686 million in trading volume in the 24 hours up to the time of writing. 

Emirates is not the region’s first airline to add a crypto checkout option. Air Arabia began accepting the dirham-backed AE Coin stablecoin for flight bookings in May 2025.

Related: Bhutan launches tourism crypto payments with Binance Pay and DK Bank

Cointelegraph is committed to independent, transparent journalism. This news article is produced in accordance with Cointelegraph’s Editorial Policy and aims to provide accurate and timely information. Readers are encouraged to verify information independently.

The battles ahead for India

Emirates has added a new way for eligible customers in the United Arab Emirates to pay for flights using cryptocurrencies. The Dubai-based airline launched Crypto.com Pay on its website and mobile app, allowing users to authorize payments from their Crypto.com wallets at checkout.

According to an Emirates announcement shared with Crypto.com, mobile users are prompted to complete the transaction inside the Crypto.com app, while desktop customers scan a QR code to proceed. Emirates will receive payment in UAE dirhams rather than taking custody of crypto itself—Crypto.com handles the conversion during the process.

Key takeaways

• Emirates customers in eligible UAE markets can use Crypto.com Pay to book flights with cryptocurrency, subject to wallet authorization and checkout flow.
• The airline is paid in UAE dirhams; Crypto.com performs the conversion, reducing direct crypto exposure for the merchant.
• Mobile and desktop users follow different checkout mechanics—app authorization for mobile and QR code settlement for desktop.
• The rollout follows a partnership first flagged earlier and comes after Crypto.com received a UAE central bank Stored Value Facilities (SVF) license.
• Emirates is joining a small set of regional airlines testing crypto-linked payment rails, alongside Air Arabia’s AE Coin option.

How Emirates’ Crypto.com Pay checkout works

Emirates says the new payment route is designed for customers who prefer to plan and book travel directly from phones. The airline’s process differs by device: smartphone users are directed to the Crypto.com app to confirm payment from their wallet, while desktop shoppers scan a QR code at checkout to complete the transaction.

This setup keeps the customer experience tied to Crypto.com’s payment infrastructure while maintaining traditional settlement on the airline’s side. By receiving dirhams instead of crypto, Emirates can continue operating its standard accounting and fare ecosystem without needing to hold or manage volatile crypto assets.

Why Crypto.com’s SVF license matters for merchants

Crypto.com Pay’s availability is tied to the company’s regulatory posture in the UAE. Earlier coverage from Cointelegraph noted that Crypto.com received a UAE central bank Stored Value Facilities (SVF) license—an authorization Crypto.com said could support integrations for payments with entities such as Emirates and Dubai Duty Free.

An SVF license generally allows licensed non-bank entities to hold customers’ money or crypto in a digital wallet and process payments under central bank oversight. For merchants, the practical implication is that customers can fund payments with cryptocurrency while the merchant receives fiat (in this case, dirhams) or approved dirham-linked stablecoin instruments, depending on the specific payment design.

That distinction is important: it changes the operational question from “can a merchant accept crypto directly?” to “can a regulated payment processor convert and settle in the merchant’s preferred currency?” Emirates’ approach appears to follow the second model, using Crypto.com for conversion and settlement.

Partnership timing and what the launch signals

Emirates and Crypto.com say the new checkout option implements a partnership first announced in July 2025. In the meantime, regional players have also been experimenting with stablecoin-linked rails. For example, Air Arabia began accepting the dirham-backed AE Coin stablecoin for flight bookings in May 2025.

By launching now, Emirates becomes the latest major travel brand in the UAE to test crypto-enabled payments—specifically through a regulated wallet and payment pathway rather than taking on direct crypto settlement risk. Emirates’ deputy president and chief commercial officer Adnan Kazim described the move as reflecting “the rapidly evolving preferences of a younger, digitally fluent generation” that manages finances and plans journeys largely from mobile devices.

Still, the airline did not specify whether Crypto.com Pay will expand beyond eligible UAE residents. For users outside those eligibility boundaries, the immediate impact is limited, even if the payment rail could theoretically be rolled out further later.

What to watch next for crypto payments in travel

Crypto payments in mainstream commerce tend to advance in stages: first through pilots, then through expansion across more routes and payment channels, and finally through deeper integration with loyalty programs and broader customer identity checks. Emirates’ decision to route crypto payments through Crypto.com’s infrastructure suggests it views this as a distribution and customer-experience upgrade rather than a wholesale shift in how fares are valued.

For the broader market, readers should watch whether the service expands to more customer segments in the UAE, whether additional airlines in the region adopt similar models, and how settlement practices evolve as more merchants rely on SVF-regulated payment processors.

With crypto payments still uneven across jurisdictions and consumer segments, the key uncertainty remains rollout scope: Emirates has launched Crypto.com Pay for eligible UAE residents, but the timeline for broader availability—and whether it will include more payment options beyond crypto-to-dirham conversion—will determine how meaningful this becomes for everyday travelers.