Yesterday saw the first meet up of the Africa Tokenization Council which covers the Middle East North Africa Region also known as MENA. The only reason I know about this is one of my investments being COTI is heavily involved within this group. The aim of the group is to bring all parties together to help promote and develop AI and the Blockchain across the region.
source
Saudi Arabia is looking to become the power house behind Real World Assets through bridging financial institutions with blockchain technology. The middle east oil reserves are not going to last forever so they need to create and establish themselves in other areas using the wealth they have already created.
Saudi Arabia's project is called Vision 2030 which aims to turn the Saudi Kingdom into the global AI hub with huge investment. They already have the Public Investment Fund known as PIF $40 billion and Project Transcendence which has a $100 billion budget to create and develop data centers, AI infrastructure and various startups. The group has already invested $1.5 billion into Groq an AI chip startup.
The Vision 2030 project aims to grow the Saudi AI market into a $62 billion business within the next 7 years. COTI's role here s to assist with the development and regulatory process applying their privacy technology which will help institutions come on board and get fully involved.
Yesterdays meeting saw roughly 40 members sit down and discuss the path forward ad areas of concern that need to be resolved. Those at the table represented a combined capital of $500 billion in AUM. Topics included DeFi TradFi and the trust building between the two and of course asset tokenization. This is basically where the capital meets crypto and and grows the entire basket.
There are another 3 more meet ups planed for the remainder of the year with one interestingly planned in New York. With the Saudi Royal Family backing this project I can see big thigs happening fast with much bigger investments from the Middle East region flowing in. Looking from the outside in this looks like the Saudi's would like to tokenise their entire economy trough using blockchain technology. This would place them near the top of the pile when it comes to having a developed financial system for the future which is far easier to achieve than most other countries around the world who have to literally change everything.
When we look into the numbers of RWA the figures are quite outstanding with a figure estimated at around $870 Trillion and as of November 2024 only 0.001346% of this is on the blockchain. You can see how early all of this is ad ow much work lies ahead to increase that percentage. Like most things change starts out slowly and grows momentum until it all falls into place. What is required is development to help facilitate all of this and why this will take time to escalate. You can understand why the Saudi's are investing heavily in this area and would like a slice of this pie.