COUNTRY FOCUS: OMAN
Abu Dhabi company Phoenix Group to create a 150-megawatt cryptocurrency-mining farm and the country will open a $ 370 million facility run by Exahertz International to start cryptocurrency mining by October 2023.
Digital payment solutions are growing rapidly, fuelling the growth of the fintech sector in Oman. The Central Bank launched its Fintech Regulatory Sandbox Framework in 2020 as a closed testing environment for fintech companies to prove their viability.
The Central Bank of Oman issued in September 2023 guidelines for banks and payment service providers to offer a card tokenisation service allowing customers to register payment cards and applications like Apple Pay and Samsung Pay in Oman.
National elections using dedicated cloud
The Government of the Sultanate of Oman launched a national initiative to migrate more than 120 government and semi-government entities to an integrated government cloud platform. Oman’ s Vision 2040 framework set a long-term development plan for a cloud-first, centralised infrastructure that would help
The Government of Oman launched a national initiative to migrate 120 + government and semigovernment entities to a government cloud platform. collaboration between the government and private sectors in these areas. In December 2022, MTCIT signed an MoU with Amazon Web Services to launch joint cloud data service centres.
Oman’ s central bank is developing its own digital currency and open banking services. In January 2022, Oman’ s financial regulator, the Capital Markets Authority, invited bids from companies to help set up a regulatory framework for virtual assets, and in July 2023, the Capital Market Authority sought public comments on its proposed regulatory framework governing digital assets.
Oman has also expressed interest in building capabilities to set up cryptocurrency data mining centres. In August 2023, Oman partnered with the government to speed innovation securely and enhance national technical capabilities.
This initiative specified the highest levels of security to help meet the most demanding data sovereignty requirements, including physical control of infrastructure and data and isolation of customer data. In addition, all operations and access had to remain in the government’ s data centres.
After extensive evaluation, the Government of the Sultanate of Oman selected OCI Dedicated Region as its sovereign cloud solution, bringing a complete set of OCI cloud services to its sensitive workloads. This sovereign cloud platform is a complete cloud region within Oman’ s borders, operated and supported by Oracle.
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