Legal Practice

For founders and boards that need a senior lawyer inside the business rather than outside counsel engaged matter by matter, Safi takes direct appointments as General Counsel, held on a fractional basis alongside Esquare Legal. He works with the CEO and board on regulation, entity structuring, fundraising, governance, IP and commercial agreements, and coordinates specialist counsel in each jurisdiction where the business operates.

He holds a deliberately small number of these appointments at a time. Current mandates include InvoiceMate and The Game Company, both named to the UAE Future 100, and Tharwa Finance.

Appointments begin with a conversation about the business and the decisions ahead of it.

Regulatory positioning and licensing for digital-asset businesses entering the UAE, Pakistan, Brazil and the EU. As Head of Legal & Compliance at Fasset, Safi secured one of Dubai's earliest VARA VASP licences and supported licensing in Indonesia, Malaysia and Bahrain. He currently represents the world's second-largest crypto exchange and several leading fintechs before PVARA.

His work in this area has been cited in Tsinghua University PhD research (2024) and in a peer-reviewed study on blockchain arbitration published through China's arbitration research community (2025). He took part in the European Commission and UNIDROIT's DARTE expert series on implementing MiCA and the Travel Rule across Latin America.

Licensing in emerging markets requires more than knowledge of the statute. It requires an understanding of where the regulator is trying to go, and the credibility to make the case to it.

Safi obtained Pakistan's first Buy Now, Pay Later licence from the SECP for QisstPay in 2021, with no precedent for the application. Esquare's Pakistan team has acted on licensing for many of the country's digital-lending NBFCs, and has worked across Pakistan's digital financial regulation from the earliest SECP fintech frameworks to the formation of PVARA, advising the companies seeking licences and presenting to the regulators issuing them.

Token launches and Tier-1 listings ($KLINK on Binance, $RWA on KuCoin), RWA tokenization structures including a USD 300 million mandate for Chinese new-energy mobility assets (mandate value), on-chain invoice financing for InvoiceMate, and seed and Series A fundraising for The Game Company.

Through the Tahota Law Firm partnership he works on Chinese capital moving into MENA and Latin America. Esquare acted for the Chinese investors in the USD 4.2 billion RUDA project (China Business Law Journal Deals of the Year 2024) and held the law firm mandate for the Chinese Embassy in Pakistan.

As lead counsel for the Jang/Geo Group, Safi secured Pakistan's largest defamation award, PKR 100 million against Bol TV's Tayyab Baloch (Additional District and Sessions Court, Islamabad, 2022). He represented all associations of Pakistan International Airlines, together more than 300,000 employees, in the PIA privatisation challenge, and has appeared in constitutional matters before the Supreme Court of Pakistan.

For a blockchain-sector client he led a cryptocurrency matter before the Supreme Court of India, heard by three of the court's senior-most judges, directing the strategy and instructing Indian counsel through to a successful outcome. His LLM thesis was cited in the NRO judgment on the recovery of illegal proceeds, which now informs his work on crypto-asset tracing and recovery.

Smart contracts are not self-enforcing in any jurisdiction that matters commercially. The code executes; the legal effect of that execution is a separate question.

Safi has worked with projects on Ethereum, Stellar, Canton and Hedera, and advises companies on designing tokenization and smart-contract systems that hold up under enforcement scrutiny in every jurisdiction where their counterparties operate. He has been cited in peer-reviewed research on the enforceability of blockchain-based dispute resolution.