The next silicon crescent? Institutional design, feasibility, and risk in a Middle Eastern digital finance network

Cross-border payments in the Middle East remain costly, operationally fragmented, and dependent on infrastructures whose governance, liquidity, and compliance arrangements are largely external to the region. This article evaluates whether a Middle Eastern Digital Finance Network (DFN) could provide an additional regional payment layer without requiring withdrawal from the existing international monetary system. The analysis uses a structured comparison of eight initiatives and institutional experiences: Project mBridge, Project Agora, Project Nexus and ASEAN Regional Payment Connectivity, the Pan-African Payment and Settlement System, TARGET Instant Payment Settlement (TIPS), the Digital Turkish Lira project, and the United Arab Emirates' Digital Dirham and Project Aber experiments. It distinguishes messaging, foreign exchange, clearing, settlement, liquidity, identity, compliance, and governance - functions that are frequently conflated in discussions of digital finance. The comparison suggests that viable regional payment integration is more likely to emerge through modular interlinking of existing domestic systems, supported by common legal and data standards, than through an immediate region-wide launch of a common digital currency or a single distributed ledger. A feasible DFN would therefore begin with a limited group of participating jurisdictions, narrow payment corridors, common legal and data standards, and measurable exit criteria. The article also examines political fragmentation, sanctions exposure, regulatory divergence, cybersecurity, data-localization disputes, elite capture, and the mixed evidence linking economic interdependence to peace. It concludes that a DFN could improve payment optionality, transparency, and resilience in selected corridors, but it cannot by itself create monetary sovereignty or regional stability. Its viability would depend on legal finality, credible governance, sustained regulatory cooperation, and a distribution of costs and benefits acceptable to participating states and private institutions.