The $45 billion in cross-border remittances flowing out of the Middle East every year mostly goes through the inefficient traditional clearing network. High costs and slow arrival times, in simple terms, mean that the financial infrastructure cannot keep up with the pace of trade. The Central Bank of the UAE has clearly seen this gap and approved last year the DDSC initiated by International Holding Company (IHC) and First Abu Dhabi Bank (FAB), which directly runs the dirham stablecoin settlement on the ADI Chain. This is the first time sovereign credit has been embedded in a programmable blockchain in this form.
Don't underestimate this action. In the past, institutional funds have taken a wait-and-see attitude towards stablecoins, lacking compliance endorsement and real reserves. DDSC perfectly meets both of these points: fiat reserves are fully custodied, the central bank license is held in hand, and the partners are local leading consortiums and commercial banks. Once the infrastructure is laid out, the next step is the natural process of liquidity sedimentation—this is not a guess, but the basic logic of the flow of institutional funds.
The UAE's annual remittance pool of 450000000 is mostly directed towards South Asia and Africa. Traditional channels charge a fee of 3% to 5%, and intermediary banks can take two to three days to process funds. DDSC operates on the ADI Chain, compressing the settlement window to seconds, significantly cutting costs. More importantly, this framework is not closed. The line with M-Pesa is already under discussion; if East Africa's mobile payment network can be integrated, there will be a real, stable, high-frequency, and predictable cross-border clearing volume on-chain. This is the real unlocking point—not speculative trading volume, but genuine foreign exchange demand.
From an investment perspective, the stage where such projects are most likely to capture value often does not occur in the first wave of conceptualization, but after infrastructure is established and compliance loops are completed. DDSC has now reached the second step: central bank approval, institutional entry, and mainnet operation. What remains is scenario penetration. Cross-border trade financing, funds pooling for multinational enterprises, and remittance markets; each sub-sector represents a trillion-level replacement space. Once ADI Chain becomes the standard channel for these capital flows, the value locked on-chain will increase exponentially.
Let's talk about stablecoins themselves. In the past, people viewed them more as a tool for inflows and outflows in the crypto market, but the DDSC sample has directly elevated this positioning to a new dimension: the digital form of sovereign currency, compliant assets backed by central banks, and programmable clearing units available around the clock. This is not the logic of a funding pool from a DeFi protocol, but rather an underlying upgrade of national financial infrastructure. The prototype of the new generation of cross-border payment tracks is already visible; simply put, it is a multilateral interoperable digital currency network, and DDSC is one of the first compliant models running on it.
Liquidity won't flood in overnight, but the direction has been set. Institutional capital has always been sensitive to low volatility, high compliance, and strong scenario assets. Wherever infrastructure is laid out, funds will follow. Currently, what is running on the ADI Chain is just the Dirham stablecoin. In the future, if the sovereign currencies of other Gulf countries are integrated using the same framework, this network will become the digital clearing center of the Middle East–Africa corridor.
Clearly, 4500000000 is just the starting point. $BNB
