Safi Ghauri advises the founders and boards of digital-asset and frontier-technology companies on the decisions that determine whether they can operate at all: where to be licensed, how to be structured, how to raise capital, and how to deal with regulators who are still writing the rules. Based in Dubai, he sits inside a small number of these companies as General Counsel and leads Esquare Legal, the crypto-native firm he founded in 2009, with teams in São Paulo, Islamabad and China.
How he works
The General Counsel role is the centre of the practice. He takes a deliberately small number of direct appointments, heading the legal function alongside the founders, advising the board and coordinating specialist counsel wherever the business operates. Current mandates include InvoiceMate and The Game Company, both named to the UAE Future 100, and Tharwa Finance, whose Shariah-certified stablecoin he took through the fatwa process.
Most of the work crosses borders, and most of the risk sits in the gaps between regimes: VARA and MiCA, PVARA and the Brazilian Central Bank, a Chinese investor and a South Asian regulator. Through Esquare and his partnership at Tahota Law Firm, he works across those gaps rather than at one end of them.
Alongside the legal practice runs a fifteen-year record as a geopolitical analyst: more than 300 broadcast appearances and a standing role as Pakistan TV's South America Correspondent. The two are not separate. Knowing where a government is heading is often the first question in a licensing strategy.
Selected work
At Fasset, he built the legal and compliance foundations behind one of Dubai's earliest VARA licences and carried the company through to its Series A.
For QisstPay, he obtained Pakistan's first Buy Now, Pay Later licence from the SECP, on an application with no precedent to follow.
As lead counsel for the Jang/Geo Group, he won Pakistan's largest defamation award, PKR 100 million against Bol TV's Tayyab Baloch, in 2022.
Background
Called to the Bar of England & Wales at Lincoln's Inn, he trained at Clyde & Co in London and with commercial firms in New York and Orlando before founding Esquare Legal. The son of a senior judge, he grew up across more than seven cities and several countries. He opened the firm's Brazil practice in São Paulo in 2024 and now divides his time between Dubai, São Paulo and Islamabad.
He has spoken at the Horasis Global Meeting, COP30 and the European Commission and UNIDROIT's DARTE expert series, and trains judges and prosecutors as a UNODC master trainer on crypto crime. Away from work he is a deep-sea diver, a rock music fan and a serious drinker of yerba mate.
