Pakistan is missing crypto's biggest opportunity

A restaurant table in Ottawa and the birth of the Bitcoin ATM

The episode opens with Muzamil asking a deceptively simple question: how does someone end up in crypto and cybersecurity before either field had a name that most people recognised? Haseeb Awan’s answer is disarmingly honest. “Accident, right? Like life is all about accident and the more stupid things you do, the more you get into accidents.”

It was 2013. Haseeb was in Ottawa, attending one of the tech meetups he made a habit of going to. He bought some bitcoin — the exchange was Mt. Gox, which would later collapse in one of the biggest scandals in crypto history — and the price halved the next day. What stayed with him was not the loss but a simpler frustration: buying bitcoin was needlessly hard. Why wasn’t there a machine?

He put the question to the table at a Vietnamese restaurant. Eight people sat down. One had a kiosk business that dispensed products in factory canteens. Another could build hardware and software. A third already ran a crypto exchange. Haseeb said he would sell whatever they built. The franchise model was straightforward: buy a machine, give us a percentage of every transaction.

What happened next is where the story turns genuinely remarkable. Haseeb had been watching a rare video interview about crypto online and tracked down the speaker on Facebook and LinkedIn. The man called back around eleven at night, said he was building something and wanted to be their first customer. He took a train from Toronto to Ottawa. They launched the machine on the first of January 2014.

That first customer, Haseeb tells Muzamil, was a co-founder of Ethereum. The house in Miami where the project was formally started — with roughly seven hundred people present — is where Cardano, Polkadot, Litecoin, and Consensus also began. “We were all staying in the same house at that time.”

Y Combinator, senators, and the opening of a worldview

At a Miami event, Haseeb demonstrated the ATM to Alexis Ohanian, the founder of Reddit. Ohanian told him to apply to Y Combinator. Haseeb had never heard of it. His co-founder, a Waterloo graduate, had. They applied as a team of four and got in — within twelve months of starting the company.

Muzamil presses him on what that felt like for someone who grew up in Peshawar, attended Islamia College, and had never travelled much on his own. Haseeb is candid about the disorientation. “I think it will, it will be a same thing” is how he later describes Pakistan’s trajectory, but in that YC moment the feeling was the opposite — a sudden expansion of what seemed possible.

Tuesday dinners at YC brought Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, and the founder of Dropbox into the same room. Quora and Product Hunt were in his batch. Gary Tan was his group partner. “You can feel him, you can touch him, you can actually hug him” — meaning you could ask these people anything directly, without intermediary, without credential check.

He also testified before Canadian senators on crypto regulation during this period. The contrast with Pakistan was not lost on him. “There I’m talking to senators and I’m educating them on crypto. I’m not even a nadhim I’ve ever met in Pakistan.” The broader point he draws is about meritocracy: in that environment, age and background were irrelevant as long as you had something to teach.

The SIM-swap problem and the birth of Efani

Between 2015 and 2019, Haseeb describes a quieter period — experimenting with ideas, staying adjacent to crypto without committing to anything full-time. The trigger for his next company was personal. His SIM card was swapped four times.

A SIM swap, he explains to Muzamil, is when someone walks into a carrier, impersonates you, and has your number transferred to a new SIM. From that point they receive your calls and texts, including every two-factor authentication code tied to your financial accounts. The attack sequence he describes is three-stage: first financial damage, then data extraction for blackmail, then reputational destruction through leaked content.

“If this is happening to me, I’m not a very important person, I’m very ordinary person. So it must be happening with a lot of people too.”

He started Efani in 2019 as what he calls, with deliberate self-deprecation, “a cell phone carrier for the rich people.” In the US, the MVNO model allows a company to lease network capacity from a major carrier — AT&T, for example — and layer its own protocols on top. Efani’s differentiator is that no one can port your number out without passing its security checks, and every customer is covered by a five-million-dollar insurance policy if something goes wrong. The company has a few thousand customers, charges a significant premium, and does not try to compete on volume. “We are like Louis or Rolls Royce.”

Additional features include a risk score for any phone number — factoring in estimated income, public profile, and Twitter following — to assess how likely that number is to be targeted. The company also offers location-tracking protection, spoofed-call blocking, and spam-link interception, though Haseeb notes these are offered only to a limited set of clients.

The coming cyber war and why telecom is now a national security asset

The conversation broadens into what Haseeb sees as the structural shift in how power is exercised globally. Traditional warfare, he argues, is obsolete in the way that sword-fighting became obsolete. Cyber operations run twenty-four hours a day, cost almost nothing, and produce near-zero collateral damage because no soldiers are deployed. “Only because bullets are not flying around. It doesn’t mean there’s no war.”

He points to a US pipeline shutdown as an example of infrastructure vulnerability. He describes how a country’s entire telecom stack — towers, chips, firmware — is typically imported, meaning that in any conflict the supplying country retains leverage. The 5G debate of 2020 and 2021, he says, was really about this: whoever controls the communication infrastructure controls the economy, and whoever controls the economy controls the world.

For Pakistan specifically, the implication is stark. “Agar hum apne officially enemy se count karte hain Pakistani, to aap unke IT ke standards ko dekh lein.” The gap is not flattering, and ignoring it is not a neutral choice.

NFTs, ownership, and what web3 actually means

Muzamil raises a use case for NFTs that goes well beyond the monkey-picture caricature. He describes a future where every photo taken by a device automatically generates an NFT, creating an immutable chain of provenance. Deepfakes become verifiable. Fake news using old footage becomes detectable. Royalties flow automatically to original creators when their content is used on platforms like YouTube.

Haseeb validates the direction. He uses the example of a painting with three copies distributed to three people who have no connection to each other — without a shared ledger, any of them could be deceived about authenticity. With tokenisation, the ownership history is public and traceable. “Authenticity is a major issue, massive issue.”

He then extends the idea to creator economics. A podcast with a thousand tokens could distribute revenue proportionally to everyone who shared it and drove views — turning consumers into shareholders. A new restaurant could give early customers equity stakes, aligning their incentives with the business’s growth. “Consumer is becoming a shareholder.”

The deeper principle, Haseeb argues, is that web3 is not primarily about currency. It is about the ability to transfer value, ownership, and incentive structures without asking permission from any intermediary. “The beautiful of crypto is it’s very easy to transfer without anyone permission, and that makes it very, very attractive for a lot of entrepreneurs like me.”

Crypto as religion, and the limits of the current market

Haseeb is not uncritical of the space he helped build. He describes the crypto community with a pointed analogy: “Crypto is like a religion. Everyone have their own book which is a white paper. Everyone have their godfather figure, prophet.” The tribal certainty that surrounds each project — the belief that one’s chosen chain will reshape the world while all others are worthless — is, in his view, a cold following rather than a rational investment thesis.

He also acknowledges that a lot of crypto projects are solutions looking for problems that do not exist at scale. The people who genuinely need cheap cross-border money transfer are not the ones being targeted by most crypto marketing. “1% own like probably 50% of the world wealth. Middle class will own like other percent. The people who are intelligent, they focus on the 1% because less people to meet, more ROI.”

The recent crash, Muzamil notes, wiped out a lot of Pakistani retail investors who were rallied by influencers and put in money they could not afford to lose. Haseeb does not dispute this. His response is to separate the financial instrument from the technology stack. Governments and the general public, he says, are both stuck on the currency layer. The real opportunity — the one Pakistan is missing — is in the developer ecosystem.

What Pakistan should actually be doing

By the end of the conversation, Haseeb makes his argument plainly. A web3 developer charges three to four times the rate of a regular developer. A crypto writer charges double. Pakistan has a large pool of technical talent and a freelancing culture that is already oriented toward international clients. The question is not whether to legalise crypto trading. The question is whether to build the skills that the global blockchain industry will pay for regardless of what any government decides about currency.

“At least we should know how it is a scam,” he says, addressing the people who dismiss the space entirely. Understanding the technology well enough to critique it is itself economically valuable.

The ban-or-permit framing, he argues, is a false binary. “Banning a technology because it has a risk — it will make its way.” The more consequential choice is whether Pakistan’s developers, writers, and entrepreneurs are inside the ecosystem when it matures or outside it.

On Pakistan’s trajectory to 2050, Muzamil asks for a realistic assessment. Haseeb gives one that is neither optimistic nor despairing. The political cycle will continue — new governments, the same complaints about petrol prices, elite capture deepening. But internet access has already broken the knowledge monopoly. “It’s not just Harvard anymore. Aap YouTube par jakar same knowledge.” That, he says, is the real silver lining: a student in Peshawar with a phone and a library card now has access to the same information as anyone anywhere. What they do with it is up to them.