Bilal
Bin Saqib MBE.

I've spent my career at the frontier of finance and technology — first as a builder, now also as a policymaker.

I came up through crypto. I started holding Bitcoin in 2016 and called it publicly in 2018, when saying so out loud in most rooms still got you laughed out of them. That conviction — that a new financial system was being built in plain sight, and that the people it would matter most to lived in places like mine — has shaped everything since.

In 2025 I was appointed to lead Pakistan's national push into digital assets: founding CEO of the Pakistan Crypto Council, then Special Assistant to the Prime Minister on Blockchain and Crypto with the status of Minister of State, and now Chairman of PVARA — the federal regulator for a country of 250 million, most of them under 30. I serve pro bono. The work has included Pakistan's regulatory framework for virtual assets, the country's Strategic Bitcoin Reserve, and putting Pakistan in the rooms — Washington, the Gulf, and beyond — where the future of money is actually being decided.

Before this, I built in a different arena. I co-founded Tayaba, a social enterprise tackling Pakistan's water crisis, and helped feed frontline NHS workers during COVID-19 — work that earned an MBE from the UK and a place on Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia. Different problems, same instinct: find the leverage point, build the thing, open the door for whoever comes next.

Pakistan is where I operate from. Emerging economies are what I work for. Billions of people were told the frontier wasn't built for them — that finance, AI and technology are things that happen elsewhere and arrive late, if at all. I think that's exactly backwards. The economies with the youngest populations, the fastest adoption curves, and the least legacy infrastructure to defend are where the next system gets built first. The door was open. Someone just forgot to tell us.