General Counsel to digital-asset and frontier-technology companies
Barrister · Managing Partner, Esquare Legal · Dubai · São Paulo · Islamabad
How I work
Selected work
The legal architecture behind InvoiceMate's DeFa platform: offering, custody, invoice-pooling and the UAE licensing path.
Tharwa Finance's structuring, governance and fatwa process, through to certification.
General Counsel to The Game Company through a USD 7 million seed and into its Series A.
Counsel to the world's second-largest crypto exchange before Pakistan's Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority.
One of Dubai's earliest VARA licences, for Fasset. Pakistan's first BNPL licence, for QisstPay.
PKR 100 million for the Jang/Geo Group, as lead counsel, in 2022.
Safi Ghauri advises the founders and boards of digital-asset and frontier-technology companies, sitting inside a small number of them as General Counsel. He leads Esquare Legal, the Dubai-headquartered firm he founded in 2009, and is a Partner of Tahota Law Firm.
A barrister of Lincoln's Inn who trained at Clyde & Co, he is also a geopolitical analyst with more than 300 broadcast appearances and Pakistan TV's South America Correspondent.
Recent speaking & media
Workshop for founders in Pakistan's government-backed incubation programme on legal pathways into South American markets.
Speaker at Brazil’s largest Web3 technical conference, on regulatory pathways for crypto and blockchain companies operating in Brazil.
View event →Quoted alongside Chatham House, Kpler and New York Law School on the tactical and legal dimensions of the US naval interdiction regime in the Strait of Hormuz.
Read article →Panellist at the Digital Assets Roundtable of Experts series on MiCA and Travel Rule implementation across Latin America.
Speaker on digital assets regulation at the 10th Horasis Global Meeting, hosted at the University of São Paulo.
300+ broadcast appearances as a legal and geopolitical analyst on South Asia, the Middle East and Latin America.
Media & speaking →For new mandates and speaking invitations.
Get in touch