I’ve sat in enough rooms in Riyadh and Dubai now to notice the pattern. It’s not loud, not something anyone announces, but it’s there in how conversations unfold. The money is real. The ambition is obvious. But the energy isn’t frantic—it’s controlled. People aren’t chasing whatever just launched on Crypto Twitter last week. They’re asking questions that feel almost out of place if you’re used to Silicon Valley.
“Will this still work in ten years?”
You don’t hear that in a Palo Alto coffee shop. There, it’s more like: “Can we ship this by next quarter and iterate later
Different instincts. Completely different timelines.
And it forces a different kind of conversation. You can’t hide behind cleverness here. Nobody cares if something is elegant but fragile. The expectation—spoken or not—is that whatever you’re proposing should survive contact with regulation, with national frameworks, with reality. Not just technically, but institutionally.
Which brings everything back to a set of questions that sound simple until you try to answer them properly
Who’s actually in the system?
On what terms
And how do you prove that without turning the whole thing into a surveillance machine?
I used to think blockchain had already “solved” enough of this to move on. That identity—messy as it was—would sort itself out once the infrastructure matured. Being here changed that pretty quickly.
Because the moment you step outside the sandbox—finance, cross-border flows, anything tied to governance—the lack of identity stops feeling like freedom and starts looking like a liability. Institutions don’t transact with abstractions. They don’t trust vibes. They need something measurable. Not full exposure, but enough signal to move forward without second-guessing every step.
And this is where the problem keeps resurfacing, meeting after meeting, from DIFC to ADGM: nobody actually wants to hold the hot potato of user data.
Everyone needs identity. Nobody wants the responsibility of storing it.
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