Zand, an Abu Dhabi-backed UAE digital bank, has , Circle’s US dollar stablecoin, alongside its own regulated Zand Dirham, letting eligible business clients settle payments, treasury operations and cross-border transactions in either currency, the bank announced on 25 August 2026.
What the expansion actually adds
Zand Dirham, issued through Zand Trust, a wholly owned subsidiary of Zand Bank, is backed one-to-one by dirham reserves held in segregated, regulated accounts and runs across multiple public blockchains. USDC, issued by Circle (NYSE: CRCL), is redeemable one-to-one for US dollars. Zand’s pitch is interoperability rather than substitution: business clients get a choice of a dirham-denominated or dollar-denominated regulated stablecoin on the same rails, rather than being pushed towards one currency.
“We built the Zand Dirham stablecoin to tear down the walls between global markets,” said Michael Chan, Zand’s chief executive.
Dr Saeeda Jaffar, Circle’s managing director for the Middle East, Turkey, Africa and Pakistan, said “interoperability between regulated stablecoins can support new opportunities for businesses.” Neither executive named a rollout date, transaction-volume figures, or which markets the USDC support activates in first.
Zand isn’t the only bank building this
following a November 2025 CBUAE approval, giving it roughly nine months of live operation before this USDC expansion. It is rated BBB+ by Fitch and backed by Abu Dhabi’s ruling family investment arm alongside Franklin Templeton, Aditya Birla Group and business figures Mohamed Alabbar and Yusuff Ali.
It isn’t the only bank-backed dirham stablecoin in the market, though. for a competing dirham-backed stablecoin on 7 January 2026, and a separate consortium of IHC, ADQ and FAB has its own dirham stablecoin moving through the CBUAE’s no-objection-certificate process. Zand’s move to add USDC specifically, rather than simply scaling its own dirham token, is the differentiator among that group.
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Why it matters
Zand already has a cross-border payments partnership with Mastercard dating to 2025, so this expansion extends an existing strategy rather than opening a new one: building settlement infrastructure that works across currencies and jurisdictions, not just inside the UAE. Stablecoin transaction volumes have grown sharply industry-wide this year, and Circle has reported USDC volumes overtaking Tether’s in 2026, giving Zand’s clients a plug into a stablecoin with genuine global liquidity rather than a UAE-only instrument.
What’s next
Zand hasn’t disclosed which markets the USDC capability activates in first, an onboarding timeline for business clients, or any transaction-volume figures for Zand Dirham’s first nine months of operation. With RAKBank’s competing stablecoin still at the in-principle stage and the IHC-ADQ-FAB token still moving through its own approval process, whether Zand’s head start converts into measurable business-client adoption is the more concrete thing to track next.
