PUSD Targets Islamic Finance
- A new stablecoin, PUSD, is targeting the $3 trillion Islamic‑finance market with regionally backed reserves. - PUSD plans 1:1 backing using Saudi riyals and UAE dirhams, both dollar‑pegged. - Issuers shifting to jurisdiction‑specific stablecoins could fragment liquidity and change how regional DeFi rails attract capital (coinmarketcap.com).
PUSD is pushing into Islamic finance with a dollar stablecoin backed by Saudi riyals and UAE dirhams instead of U.S. bank deposits. (coinmarketcap.com) A stablecoin is a crypto token meant to hold a fixed price, usually $1, so traders and payment firms can move digital dollars without wiring cash through banks. Palm USD says PUSD is fully backed 1:1 by reserves in Saudi riyals and UAE dirhams, two currencies that are themselves pegged to the U.S. dollar. (palmusd.com) Palm Azgar Finance announced PUSD in November 2025 through a British Virgin Islands affiliate, describing the token as fully backed by Gulf-currency reserves held in regulated, Shariah-compliant institutions. The company said the issuer is tied to a licensed financial services provider headquartered in Riyadh. (salaamgateway.com) This week, PUSD said it is deploying on ADI Chain, a layer-2 blockchain built for institutional settlement in the Middle East. CoinMarketCap and Cointelegraph reported about $2.3 billion of PUSD in circulation and existing support on Ethereum, BNB Chain, Solana and Tron. (coinmarketcap.com) Islamic finance covers banking, bonds and insurance structured to comply with Shariah rules, including bans on interest and requirements for asset-linked transactions. The Islamic Financial Services Board said the industry reached $3.88 trillion in 2024, up 14.9% from a year earlier. (ifsb.org) PUSD’s pitch is that a token backed by Gulf currencies and framed as Shariah-compliant may fit more easily into treasury and settlement flows in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates than a conventional dollar-backed coin. Palm USD says the product is aimed at enterprises, financial institutions and sovereign entities. (palmusd.com) The reserve design depends on two long-running currency pegs. The Saudi riyal has been fixed at 3.75 per U.S. dollar since 1986, and the Central Bank of the UAE says it intervenes to maintain the dirham’s peg to the dollar. (bis.org) (centralbank.ae) That means PUSD is still economically a digital dollar, but its reserves sit inside Gulf monetary systems rather than in the Treasury bills and U.S. bank accounts used by the biggest stablecoin issuers. CoinMarketCap described the move as part of a broader push toward jurisdiction-specific stablecoins. (coinmarketcap.com) That shift could leave digital-dollar liquidity spread across more local rails, with separate compliance rules, banking partners and redemption channels in each market. ADI Chain’s own announcement said the network is positioning itself for institutional settlement in the Middle East as the United Arab Emirates builds out its stablecoin framework. (coti.news) For now, the test is simple: whether institutions that already use Islamic-finance structures will actually hold and settle with a Gulf-reserve stablecoin at scale. PUSD has the reserve story, the regional pitch and a reported multibillion-dollar supply; the harder part is turning that into daily payments and trading volume. (cointelegraph.com)
