Cointelegraph, a leading blockchain media outlet founded in 2013, is expanding to the Middle East and North Africa region through a new franchise owner, Luna Media Corporation.

Headquartered in Dubai with offices in Miami and Singapore, Luna Media Corporation aims to bring mass adoption of web3 through informative and engaging content.

The new Arabic edition will be the tenth addition to 9 local versions of the English website, including French, Spanish, German, Italian, Turkish, Chinese, Korean, Portuguese, and Japanese. Elijah Leyb, vice president of global operations at Cointelegraph, said he is “looking forward to securing our position in the very promising MENA region with our new partner.”

Commenting on the new development, Cointelegraph editor-in-chief Kristina Lucrezia Cornèr stated: “The MENA region is booming with innovative projects, including blockchain and crypto, and it is an amazing opportunity for us to grow our readership through original content produced in Arabic from within one of the most active modern hubs of the fintech community, Dubai.”

Dubai has been leading the arab world in blockchain technology adoption. With the introduction of the virtual assets license (VAL) law for crypto-businesses in March, Dubai attracted a lot of international and local blockchain startups to the thriving MENA hub, including Bybit and Binance. The VAL Law then led to the establishment of the Dubai Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority (VARA), which is responsible for supervising the legal framework for businesses related to digital assets, including crypto assets, virtual assets, and non-fungible tokens (NFTs).

On July 18th, Dubai also announced the launch of the Dubai Metaverse Strategy, which was set to generate up to $4 billion for the city’s GDP and create 40,000 additional jobs in the augmented and virtual reality sectors by 2030 in an effort to transform the emirate into a global capital of emerging technologies, attracting over 1,000 companies in the sector and contributing $500 million to the national economy. 

The Dubai Metaverse Strategy paved the way for the Dubai Metaverse Assembly, which will be hosting more than 300 global experts, policymakers, thought leaders and decision makers from more than 40 organizations this September to discuss how to best leverage web3 opportunities and humanize metaverse applications to enhance quality of life.