GIFT Report 2025/26: Key market signals of the global Islamic fintech ecosystem

Islamic finance is getting its digital‑assets moment, and to the disappointment of crypto’s loudest evangelists, it looks less like a meme‑coin rally and more like a systems upgrade.

Across the Gulf and South-east Asia, the industry is converging on a pragmatic division of use cases: stablecoins and central bank digital currencies for settlement, tokenisation for distributing real assets, and Shariah governance as an operating system rather than a marketing badge.

The market signals are already visible. CoinMarketCap put total stablecoin market cap at about $317 billion early Jan 26. This is large enough to draw attention as a meaningful settlement rail in a world obsessed with speed, cost and cross-border friction. Tokenised real‑world assets are far smaller: CoinMarketCap shows roughly $4.31 bn of “distributed” tokenised assets (excluding stablecoins) on the same time period. Where institutions are showing up is in on‑chain cash and cash‑equivalents, notably tokenised treasury and money‑market funds. Stablecoin story is still largely wholesale: A JPMorgan analysed estimated only about 6% of stablecoin demand (around $15bn at the time) was payments‑related.