Bitcoin price hit $70,000 on Wednesday. It was the first time since June. The move did not last. Bitcoin slipped back below the level within hours.
By Thursday morning, bitcoin price had settled near $69,100. That is a gain of almost 8 percent on the day. It is up 9 percent on the week. The swing from Wednesday’s low near $64,100 topped $5,700.
Ether moved faster. It surged 18 percent in 24 hours, back above $2,250.
The trigger came from Washington. US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent doubled the size of the department’s bond buyback operations. Traders read this as fresh support for a Treasury market worth more than $30 trillion. Roughly $1.4 billion in short positions were liquidated within four hours. Bearish traders rushed to cover. The 30-year US yield fell to 5.18 percent. President Trump added to the mood. He met crypto executives from Coinbase, Gemini, Ripple, and Chainlink Labs at the White House. He urged Congress to pass the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act.
In Abu Dhabi, Abdallah Abu-Sheikh is not waiting for bitcoin price to settle before deciding where crypto fits. He founded Mal, an AI-native Islamic digital financial platform. The company raised $230 million in seed funding. Mal calls it the largest publicly announced fintech seed investment in the Middle East and Africa. The Central Bank of the UAE gave Mal in-principle approval in May 2026 to build a licensed bank. Abu-Sheikh’s view on crypto is direct. Digital assets should be judged on how they work. The test is whether that structure fits Islamic financial principles, not whether the asset is new. It is a working framework, not a final answer. Islamic financial assets in the UAE alone stand at AED 1.4 trillion, spread across 43 licensed institutions.
AMINA Bank has spent the same stretch building infrastructure, not opinions. AMINA is a FINMA-regulated Swiss bank with a Gulf presence through an ADGM branch in Abu Dhabi. It became the first regulated bank to integrate Mesh, a crypto payments network. Mesh connects more than 300 wallet providers. Myles Harrison, AMINA’s Chief Product Officer, said depositing into a bank used to mean wallet signing on outside platforms and multi-step manual checks. The Mesh integration cuts that down to a few clicks. Dr. Sebastian Preil, AMINA’s Global Head of B2B2C, pointed to the real problem this solves. Regulated institutions entering crypto need to verify a client’s on-chain activity alongside their normal financial profile. The volumes behind this are large. Bessemer Venture Partners data cited by AMINA puts real-world stablecoin payments at $400 billion in 2025. That figure doubled even as broader crypto markets fell. Corporate treasury and cross-border settlement drove 60 percent of it, the exact flows a trade-heavy Gulf economy produces.
UAE retail investors moved early too. eToro’s second-quarter data, specific to its UAE users, shows Bitmine Immersion Technologies gaining 75 percent more holders. This happened while the stock fell more than 25 percent over the same stretch. Nagham Hassan, Market Analyst at eToro MENA, called it a case of investors buying the dip. She linked it to a wider pattern. UAE users are digging deeper for opportunities instead of sticking to mega-cap names.
The rest of the Gulf backs up that read. Mubadala raised its holding in BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust by 46 percent quarter on quarter, to 12.7 million shares. The Abu Dhabi Investment Council added 3 percent to its own position. Together, Mubadala’s stake in the fund passed $1 billion. That position was built while bitcoin price sat near $65,000, well off its earlier peak. Emirates NBD has said separately that it is exploring bitcoin for its own portfolio. The bank frames it as digital gold, not a trade. The regional crypto market these positions sit inside is still small. It was valued at $869 million in 2025. It is forecast to grow near 17 percent a year through 2034. The institutions inside it are no longer treating the asset as a test.
Wednesday’s bitcoin price rally will fade or hold on two things. One is whether the Clarity Act clears its September vote. The other is whether Treasury’s buyback support lasts. GCC capital has already answered a different question. An Islamic bank is rewriting its own screening rules. A Swiss institution is building settlement rails through Abu Dhabi. UAE retail investors bought weakness rather than waiting it out. The region stopped treating bitcoin price as the question worth answering first.
