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Ripple has secured a new strategic partnership in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) as the country continues to position itself as a regional hub for digital assets and blockchain innovation.
The company announced on Tuesday that it is expanding its relationship with Zand, a UAE‑based digital bank built around artificial intelligence (AI) and blockchain technology, to support the development of the digital economy through stablecoins and distributed ledger solutions.
Under the collaboration, Zand and Ripple will work together on a range of initiatives centered on Zand’s UAE dirham‑backed stablecoin, AEDZ, and Ripple’s US dollar stablecoin, RLUSD.
According to both parties, the goal is to create new infrastructure and use cases that connect traditional financial services with on-chain systems within a regulated environment.
Reece Merrick, Ripple’s managing director for the Middle East and Africa, said in a social media post that the agreement builds on an earlier payments partnership between the two firms.
He explained that Ripple and Zand are now expanding their cooperation to explore several areas, including support for RLUSD within Zand’s regulated digital asset custody platform, as well as direct liquidity solutions between RLUSD and AEDZ.
According to the official statement, the expanded partnership will also focus on examining the feasibility of seamless liquidity between the two stablecoins and issuing AEDZ on the XRP Ledger (XRPL).
Any deployment on XRPL would be accompanied by appropriate compliance standards, monitoring tools, and risk management controls, the companies said.
Zand’s Chief Executive Officer, Michael Chan, said the bank views stablecoins, blockchain technology, and tokenization as key building blocks as traditional finance increasingly moves on-chain.
He described the partnership with Ripple as an important milestone for the growth of the digital asset ecosystem in the UAE, adding that it could reshape how governments and businesses interact with secure and trusted blockchain‑based solutions.
At the time of writing, XRP was trading at $1.40. It has registered major losses of 26% and 33% over the past fourteen and thirty days, respectively. This positions the fifth-largest cryptocurrency 61% below its all-time high of $3.65.
Featured image from OpenArt, chart from TradingView.com
