In 2017, as much of the crypto industry chased exchanges, token launches, and trading volume, Shawn Yan was focused on a different question: what infrastructure would enterprises actually need if digital assets became part of mainstream financial operations?

That question became the foundation of Cregis, the digital-asset infrastructure company he founded later that year. Nine years on, it serves more than 4,000 enterprises globally, and its strongest institutional demand is now coming from the Middle East, where it supports financial institutions, brokers, and payment companies.

A Founder Who Skipped the Crypto Boom

Shawn Yan is Founder and CEO of Cregis. Yan came to digital assets from the unglamorous side of finance. Before Cregis, he spent years building technology for peer-to-peer lending and consumer-finance platforms, work that taught him how financial infrastructure is assembled and where it breaks. He had first met Bitcoin as a miner, drawn to how value moved rather than to its price.

Around 2016, he noticed a gap. Companies were starting to use digital assets in real operations, yet almost no enterprise-grade infrastructure existed, so firms built wallet systems from scratch and carried the security risk themselves. He believed infrastructure would outlast market cycles, since every new application would eventually rely on the same underlying systems. From that came a rule that still governs the company: build infrastructure, not the businesses that run on top of it.

How Customer Challenges Shaped the Platform

Cregis did not set out to build a complete platform on day one. It grew with its customers. The first problem was secure storage, which produced Cregis  Wallet-as-a-Service (WaaS) layer built on self-custodial MPC technology, where customers retain control of assets while Cregis provides the underlying infrastructure on a subscription model. As clients spread across wallets, entities, and chains, the problem became moving assets, which brought the Cregis Rails layer and its key product, the payment engine.

More recently, banks and brokers have been asking for stronger governance, auditability, and internal controls, pushing Cregis to extend its infrastructure towards custody capabilities in the near future. The platform has evolved through successive enterprise use cases rather than a predefined roadmap, gradually forming a single system for holding, moving, and governing digital assets. 

Yan attributes much of that to the company’s long-term approach to infrastructure building. The focus on customer-driven development has meant the company has not taken on external funding to date, keeping product priorities aligned with customer needs rather than investor timelines.

Each capability has had to prove itself through real-world adoption. That approach is reflected in the company’s scale, with more than $300 billion in transactions processed across over 50 countries and, by its own account, no major security incident in nine years.

Why the Gulf Moved First

Cregis did not arrive in the Middle East to test an idea. It established its regional hub in Dubai in 2024 and now serves around 200 long-term enterprise-paid deployments across the UAE and the broader Gulf region, spanning financial institutions, forex brokers, and payment companies.

Yan puts the regional case bluntly: “We’re not entering the region to explore demand. We’re scaling in a market where the core use cases are already proven.”

Part of why the Gulf moved ahead of Europe is timing. Governments set out digital-asset rules earlier, regulators engaged the industry directly rather than at arm’s length, and institutions began experimenting while peers elsewhere waited for clarity.

The other part is trade. Dubai sits between Europe, Africa, South Asia, and the CIS region, a position that generates constant cross-border brokerage and payment flows, exactly the activity that benefits from faster settlement and multi-entity treasury control. Demand there, Yan notes, is institution-led rather than retail-driven. What the company sees in the Gulf is a local version of a wider change.

“Digital assets are moving from the edge of the organization to the core of the organization,” Yan said, with companies shifting from asking how to gain exposure to asking how to collect stablecoin payments and run treasury across jurisdictions.

In the region that shift is further along, because the cross-border flows that justify it already exist, and the institutions running them are looking to settle faster and reconcile less.

That is also why brokers moved first, and payment firms are following. FX brokers run client money across several jurisdictions and feel slow settlement immediately, while cross-border payment companies face the same pressure on margins and timing. For both, digital assets are operational tools, not speculative ones.

The company operates in a space that includes infrastructure providers such as Fireblocks and Copper, with Cregis positioning itself more toward payment-linked and operational workflows within enterprise fund movement.

Yan is blunt about the motive: on why businesses take up new payment rails, he says, “the answer is rarely ideological. It’s because they’re faster, cheaper, or operationally better than the alternatives.” The same dynamic has helped Cregis expand from Asia into new markets, where buyers tend to mirror the types of financial institutions it already serves.

Despite growing adoption, Yan argues that the real challenges rarely lie in the technology itself. The friction typically appears only after systems are deployed, particularly in governance, controls, reconciliation, and audit processes. In regulated markets across the Gulf, these operational requirements often determine whether adoption moves beyond the initial deployment. 

Regulation, in Yan’s reading, has been an enabler rather than a brake. “Legitimacy matters as much as functionality,” he says, and here, showing alignment with recognized governance standards is often a precondition for adoption, shaping risk approvals and board decisions.

Clear rules, he argues, do not create demand so much as give institutions the confidence to act on demand that already exists. Cregis describes itself as operating under a compliance-first approach, working within regulatory frameworks across the markets it serves while adapting its infrastructure to local requirements.

He is convinced the next phase will be decided by usefulness rather than novelty. “The winners in this next phase won’t be the companies building new blockchains. They’ll be the companies making digital assets usable within existing financial systems,” he says, which is the work Cregis has spent nine years doing for banks, brokers, and payment firms.

Yan’s longer-term aim is for Cregis to become the default operating infrastructure for institutional digital-asset activity in the Gulf, starting with FX brokers and payment companies and extending to banks, since institutions adopt in waves and brokerages move faster than banks.

He measures the goal in an unusual way: “Success for us is not visibility. It is reliability that becomes invisible over time.” For a profitable operation now in its third year in the Gulf, that quiet reliability is the entire pitch.

Disclaimer: This is an article written by Cregis; Fintechnews does not endorse and is not responsible for or liable for any content, accuracy, quality, advertising, products or other materials on this page. Readers should do their own research before taking any actions related to the company. Fintechnews is not responsible, directly or indirectly, for any damage or loss caused or alleged to be caused by or in connection with the use of or reliance on any content, goods or services mentioned in the article.

Please note this is no investment advice.

Featured image: Edited by Fintech News UAE, based on image by diwdom5355 via Magnific