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UAE interest in crypto jumps after Trump’s ‘strategic reserve’ call

By Chris Hamill-Stewart
Man works at laptop. Online searches for bitcoin prices more than doubled after President Trump’s post on his Truth Social network Alamy
Online searches for bitcoin prices more than doubled after President Trump’s post on his Truth Social network
  • Searches for bitcoin prices double
  • Trading app downloads up 41%
  • Crypto prices surge

Interest in cryptocurrencies has accelerated in the UAE after a rally in prices that followed President Donald Trump’s announcement of plans to create a so-called crypto strategic reserve.

Online searches for bitcoin prices in the UAE more than doubled following Trump’s announcement on his Truth Social platform at the weekend, data from Google Trends showed.

Interest has been growing in the UAE, with downloads for mobile apps related to cryptocurrency trade and investment up by 41 percent last year, according to data from the analytics company AppsFlyer provided to AGBI.

In October, before the US presidential election, crypto apps were installed 1.4 million times in the UAE. That rose sharply the following month, after Trump’s win, to 2.5 million installations. There were 2.8 million installations in December and 3.4 million in January.

Prices for the five coins that the US president mentioned at the weekend — bitcoin, ethereum, XRP, solana and cardano — jumped after his announcement, with bitcoin and ethereum rising by 10 percent each.

On Monday, bitcoin was trading for $92,500 and ethereum, the second-most expensive cryptocurrency globally, at $2,357. Prices for cardano, XRP and solana surged by more than 60 percent on Sunday, though they fell back on Monday.

Beneficiaries of the rise in cryptocurrency prices in the UAE will include Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund, Mubadala, which has a $437 million stake in BlackRock’s iShares bitcoin exchange-traded fund.

The rebound also followed a fall in prices in recent weeks, with the global crypto market worth nearly $1 trillion less than it had been in December. 

Bitcoin prices had risen during the fourth quarter, briefly breaking through $106,000 in December and approaching that figure again in late January before falling to roughly $80,000 in late February.

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