By Gulf Times Now RIYADH — In a historic summit, all six Gulf Cooperation Council member states — Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain and Oman — reached formal agreement to develop and launch a unified digital currency, the Gulf Digital Dinar, by 2027, in what would become the world’s first successful multinational central bank digital currency.
The agreement, signed at an extraordinary GCC leaders’ summit in Riyadh, represents a decade of monetary integration discussions finally reaching consensus, driven in part by the accelerating development of digital currency infrastructure across all six member states independently.
The Gulf Digital Dinar will operate on a purpose-built distributed ledger infrastructure, jointly administered by all six central banks. It will be fully backed by a basket of GCC sovereign assets, interoperable with existing banking systems, and designed to facilitate real-time, zero-fee cross-border transactions within the bloc — eliminating the costly friction that has long hampered intra-GCC trade and investment.