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Crypto Trading Platform Rain Gets Faster, Direct Payments
The partnership with Tarabut Gateway is the first “directly integrated” open banking API in the MENA crypto sector.
Tarabut Gateway, the largest open banking platform in the MENA region, has announced a new partnership with Rain, the region’s first fully-regulated crypto assets trading platform.
Rain is licensed by the Central Bank of Bahrain as a crypto broker and offers users a safe, secure space to buy and sell crypto and store their assets. Meanwhile, Tarabut Gateway provides connectivity for payments between banks and fintech, offering a smooth, fast payment process for end users.
The partnership is the first of its kind in the MENA region. It will help to bring about faster, lower-cost fiat-to-crypto transfers to end-users in Bahrain, enabling direct payments from bank accounts without the need to leave Rain’s platform.
“We’re delighted to unveil a solution to make fiat-to-crypto transfers quicker, more secure, and cost-effective. Our partnership with Rain is a perfect cross-sector synergy, made possible by Bahrain’s advanced open banking ecosystem,” says Abdulla Almoayed, Founder and CEO of Tarabut Gateway.
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The new payment method utilizes Tarabut Gateway’s open banking solution to facilitate fiat-crypto-fiat transfers, reducing errors and unlocking significantly increased transfer speeds compared to traditional bank services. The upgrade is part of Rain’s strategy to provide users with a premium, seamless crypto wallet experience.
“Through quick and efficient deposit mechanisms, crypto traders on Rain’s platform will now be able to seamlessly fund their accounts and capitalize on market movements,” says Joseph Dallago, Chief Executive Officer of Rain.
The partnership comes as MENA’s crypto sector expands at a breakneck pace. According to Chainalysis, the region is the world’s fastest-growing crypto market, with trading volumes climbing nearly 50% in the year to June 2022.
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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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