Tarabut Gateway teams with Rain to Tap MENA Crypto Market

The open banking platform Tarabut Gateway enters the region’s bustling crypto market.

The company announced On Tuesday (March 14) it had merged with Rainthe first regulated cryptocurrency trading platform in the Middle East/North Africa (MENA) region.

“The partnership is the company’s first collaboration with a crypto asset service provider,” Tarabut said in a press release. “It will provide faster, cost-effective fiat-to-crypto transactions to Bahraini end users and enable funding payments directly from user bank accounts without having to leave Rain’s platform.”

According to the release, the new feature will use Tarabut Gateway’s open bank payment offering to allow on- and off-ramp (fiat-crypto-fiat) transfers for users, increasing speed and reducing errors associated with traditional bank transfers.

“Our partnership with Rain is a perfect cross-sector synergy, made possible by Bahrain’s advanced open banking ecosystem,” said Abdullah Almoayed, Tarabut Gateway’s founder and CEO. “Crypto trading, wallets and other blockchain use cases are natural allies in opening up traditional banking and finance.”

The partnership follows findings last year which show that the MENA region is the world’s fast growing market for crypto.

An October report by Chain analysis found that the volume of crypto received in that part of the world climbed 48% between June 2021 and June 2022, to $566 billion.

“MENA is also home to three of the top 30 countries in this year’s index: Turkey (12), Egypt (14) and Morocco (24),” the company said. “Use cases around savings preservation and remittance, as well as increasingly permissive crypto regulations, help explain why.”

And while the region’s major business hubs – countries such as Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) – have not often hit the upper tier of the crypto adoption index, Chainalysis said their place in the crypto world should not be discounted.

The Tarabut/Rain team also happen to be crypto firms looking for banking services outside the US after three bank failures.

“The two biggest crypto-friendly banks are gone,” crypto hedge fund manager Marco Lim told Bloomberg News recently regarding the recently shuttered Signature bank and Silvergate capitalboth of which did business in the digital asset sector.

While their collapses were somewhat overshadowed by Silicon Valley Bank’s failure, the Bloomberg report pointed out that Signature and Silvergate’s downfalls are particularly problematic, as those banks provided the crypto sector with real-time, 24/7 payment networks.