Emirates NBD's Liv Adds Central Bank-Registered USDU Dollar Stablecoin to Its App

The bank worked with Universal Digital Intl, which issues USDU, and Aquanow, which runs the systems behind USDU distribution and behind Liv X, the crypto service Liv started offering in 2025. Aquanow is licensed by Dubai's Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority. The companies said this is the first time a stablecoin of this kind has been integrated into a UAE digital bank.

The arrangement puts a token covered by the central bank's Payment Token Services Regulation into the retail app of one of the country's largest banking groups. Until now, Liv X customers had access to crypto assets but not to a dirham-regulated dollar token.

Each USDU is backed one-to-one by physical US dollar reserves held with UAE banks, and the reserves are checked in monthly attestations that are published, the companies said. When USDU launched in Abu Dhabi in January, Universal said the reserves sat in onshore accounts at Emirates NBD and Mashreq, with attestations from a global accounting firm, Cointelegraph reported at the time. The central bank registered USDU as a foreign payment token, and Universal is regulated by the Financial Services Regulatory Authority of Abu Dhabi Global Market. At launch, USDU was described as a token for institutional and professional users that could not be used for general retail payments on the UAE mainland, where dirham instruments remain the standard. The statements about the Liv integration did not say how customers will be able to use the token beyond managing it in the app.

Rohit Garg, Emirates NBD's group head of retail products and chief digital officer of retail banking and wealth management, said adding the token would give customers "a secure, transparent and regulated bridge to digital assets within their everyday banking app".

Juha Viitala, senior executive officer at Universal, said "USDU was built to bring transparent, USD-backed settlement into UAE regulatory frameworks."

To mark the launch, Liv is charging no fees on crypto purchases and sales for three months, an offer aimed at both new and experienced users.