Tarabut Gateway Teams With Rain to Tap MENA Crypto Market

The open banking platform Tarabut Gateway is entering its region’s busy crypto market.

The company announced Tuesday (March 14) it had teamed with Rain, the first regulated cryptocurrency asset 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 news release. “It will bring about faster, cost-effective fiat-to-crypto transactions to Bahrain end-users and enable funding payments directly from user bank accounts without the need to leave Rain’s platform.”

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

“Our partnership with Rain is a perfect cross-sector synergy, made possible by Bahrain’s advanced open banking ecosystem,” said Abdulla 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 that shows that the MENA region is the world’s fast-growing market for crypto.

An October report by Chainalysis found that the volume of crypto received in that part of the world climbed 48% between June 2021 and June 2022, to hit $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 payments, as well as increasingly permissive crypto regulations, help explain why.”

And while the region’s major business hubs — countries like Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) — haven’t 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 up is also happening as crypto firms are looking for banking services outside the U.S. after three banking failures.

“The two biggest crypto friendly banks are gone,” crypto hedge fund executive Marco Lim told Bloomberg News recently regarding the recently-closed Signature Bank and Silvergate Capital, both 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 downfall is especially problematic, as these banks provided the crypto sector with real-time, round-the-clock payment networks.