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Bybit And Ghaf Labs Partner To Advance MENA Web3 Adoption
The duo plans to co-develop startups, talent, and lifestyle use cases that bring crypto closer to everyday life.
Bybit, the world’s second-largest crypto exchange, has announced a multi-year strategic partnership with Dubai-based Web3 advisory firm Ghaf Labs to accelerate blockchain adoption and ecosystem development across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA).
The Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) formalizes a collaboration designed to position the MENA region as a global Web3 hub, focusing on innovation, regulatory support, and real-world blockchain applications — from finance to hospitality.
“Our partnership with Ghaf Labs is rooted in a shared vision for the MENA region — one where crypto isn’t just adopted, but lived,” said Helen Liu, COO and Partner at Bybit. “From developer tooling to lifestyle integration, we’re building the bridges that bring crypto into everyday life”.
Through the partnership, Bybit and Ghaf Labs will offer equity-free grants, access to resources, and strategic guidance for startups working at the intersection of blockchain, AI, and sustainability — three pillars of the region’s digital transformation agenda.
Bybit and Ghaf Labs will also focus on nurturing a robust talent pipeline through university programs, bootcamps, and hackathons aimed at empowering developers and entrepreneurs in Arabic- and English-speaking communities.
“This partnership with Bybit reflects our shared commitment to advancing Web3 infrastructure, education, and institutional engagement,” said Feras Al Sadek, Co-Founder and Managing Partner at Ghaf Labs. “Together, we aim to accelerate innovation and continue to position the UAE as a global hub for digital assets”.
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Beyond infrastructure and talent, the partnership also seeks to amplify crypto’s real-world utility through products like the Bybit Card, which connects digital assets to high-end experiences. Early use cases include premium travel perks with Grand Millennium Hotels in Dubai — part of a broader push to embed crypto in lifestyle, luxury, and day-to-day spending.
The collaboration will also strengthen Web3’s cultural footprint through co-branded regional events like the Crypto Polo Cup and Crypto Fight Night, blending sport, entertainment, and crypto to spark mainstream engagement.
With this MOU, Bybit and Ghaf Labs plan to further explore institutional integration, innovation funding, and sector-specific blockchain use cases, including applications in finance, hospitality, and education. The initiative complements the UAE’s broader strategy to establish itself as a digital-first economy.
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UAE-Built Falcon-H1 Arabic Leads LLM Benchmarks
The lean Emirati-built language model beats larger global systems and puts Arabic at the center of training.
Abu Dhabi’s Technology Innovation Institute has released an Arabic-first large language model that tops global test boards, an uncommon edge for a region long served by English-centric systems.
Falcon-H1 Arabic comes in 3B, 7B and 34B versions. The flagship posts 75.36% accuracy on comprehensive Arabic tasks and ranks first on the Open Arabic LLM Leaderboard. It also outperforms Meta’s Llama-70B and Alibaba’s Qwen-72B while using less than half their parameters. The smallest model beats Microsoft’s Phi-4 Mini by ten percentage points on equivalent benchmarks.
Arabic remains hard territory for AI. Flexible word order, dense morphology and constant switching between regional dialects and Modern Standard Arabic leave many global models missing context or tone. Academic research has pointed to a shortage of annotated datasets for dialect and informal speech. The impact shows up in classrooms, call centers and government portals where Arabic chatbots lag their English counterparts.
TII trained Falcon-H1 Arabic on formal writing, dialects and culturally grounded content. Beyond scores, it handles practical use: long conversations, reasoning rather than literal translation, and inputs of up to 192,000 words — enough for medical records or legal filings.
“The aim is innovation that is accessible, relevant, and impactful,” said Faisal Al Bannai, Adviser to the UAE President and Secretary-General of the Advanced Technology Research Council.
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Arabic is spoken by more than 450 million people across over 20 countries, yet has often been treated as a secondary language for foundation models. The UAE move signals a push to flip that logic and build Arabic-native stacks rather than wait for global systems to improve.
Falcon models have led their categories since 2023. With H1 Arabic, TII is offering free access via chat.falconllm.tii.ae for developers, media, healthcare and public-sector users looking to automate in natural Arabic.
As the region continues to invest in sovereign computing and data localization, the addition of Falcon-H1 Arabic adds a powerful tool built for the native language, instead of an afterthought attached to an English-trained system.
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