What web3 actually means once you strip out the money

A PAF brat, a year of English literature, and the confidence that came after

The episode opens with Muzamil being unusually candid about why he booked the guest. He is about to travel to Dubai, where a lot of the work around web3 and the metaverse is concentrated, and he would rather not arrive and “look foolish” trying to talk about a field he only half understands. So he wanted an intro to web3 from someone who works in it daily. That someone is Talha Bin Afzal, co-founder and CEO of Algorite, a Pakistani studio that builds web3 services — games and metaverse experiences on Unity and Unreal — for startups around the world.

Before any of the technology, the conversation winds back through Talha’s life. He describes himself as a “PAF brat,” moving between cities and schools across Pakistan, then hitting a sharp cultural shock in 2009 when his family moved to Rome and he did the International Baccalaureate at a British international school. The detail he lingers on is English literature. He was good at the sciences — same formula, same exam logic — but the similes, the symbolism and the metaphors were a different language. He even asked his teacher whether he could switch to Urdu literature instead. The teacher told him he could, but no one there would teach it; he’d be on his own. His father said do it anyway: the worst case is lower marks. Talha pushed through the first year, then spent a summer watching films with subtitles and joining Model United Nations until the grip came.

Muzamil pulls a wider point out of that story. The barrier, he argues, was never really language — it was confidence. He notes that under his own podcast, people leave comments asking why he speaks English when “all Pakistanis speak Urdu,” and he finds it strange that a country obsessed with exports and being global citizens resists the global language. Talha agrees, and adds a contrast from Europe: his classmates spoke broken English to each other and nobody corrected anyone’s past participles, because it was simply a medium of communication. The lesson both land on is small and practical — speak it however badly, just enough that the other person understands, and encourage people instead of laughing at them.

From a borderline admission to six years inside Pakistan’s IT policy

Talha’s route into computer science was almost accidental. He had applied to do electrical engineering at the Center for Advanced Studies in Engineering (CASE), but his IB equivalency came back around 50%, below the cutoff. The department head offered him a place in the new computer science program instead. When his final equivalency was later recalculated at 68% — enough for electrical engineering after all — he had already started CS. He treats it the way he treats most of his story: as luck protecting him from his own preference. “Sometimes God is protecting you from your own mistakes.”

Being the first batch of a brand-new program had one real advantage. The university was hand-picking faculty — PhDs and masters returning from places like Georgia Tech — so the teaching was strong even if the campus, then tucked under the Sir Syed Memorial Museum, looked more like a community college than a university. After internships and a short stint as a software engineer at DPL, he made the move that defined the next phase. A former boss, about to chair PASHA — the Pakistan Software Houses Association — asked him to come along.

He spent roughly six years there, and he describes it as an education in the whole machinery of the industry. He worked on membership and on events from small meetups up to the PASHA ICT Awards and the regional APICTA awards. More substantively, he sat inside the regulatory and policy discussions: why Pakistan should sign the Information Technology Agreement to drop customs duties on IT imports, and how taxation on IT exports should be handled. In 2016 he worked on a campaign to extend the zero-rated tax treatment on IT exports, getting it pushed first to 2019 and then to 2025. The hardest part, he says, was not the policy — it was assembling a community of CEOs who instinctively wanted to stay as far from government as possible. He later served as acting secretary general for about a year and a half, through the peak of COVID, a period he argues was the single biggest accelerant for Pakistan’s digital economy.

Why leave a clear path to start a Web3 studio

Muzamil presses the obvious question. Talha had a clean career trajectory — policy roles, an association leadership track, a network of C-level contacts. Why walk away to start a software house, and specifically one in a field with almost no local work? Talha admits he had always assumed he’d start his own business eventually; he had simply never exercised the muscle. The job offers on the table — an oil-and-gas technology firm, a co-working company — were safe. His logic was that if he didn’t start now, he never would.

The choice of web3 came from two places. One was personal taste: he calls himself a visual person, drawn to graphics, CGI and immersive, interactive spaces. The other was a frustration with where Pakistani games had stalled — titles that only ran on the Play Store, usually reskinned clones of something else. He wanted to start where adoption starts. “Gamers are always the first adopters everywhere in the world,” he says, and from games you can move into the more interactive, immersive experiences web3 enables, while doing the outsourced work that studios abroad want done.

The web, retold as a story about ownership

This is the part Muzamil came for, and Talha gives the cleanest version of it. He retells the history of the web as a story about permissions. Web1 was the early-2000s internet of plain pages: text written by media houses, companies and institutions, where you as a user could only read. One-way. Web2 was the YouTube, Facebook, Wikipedia and Google era — read and write, with user-generated content. But, he stresses, you never owned what you posted. Facebook’s guidelines made the content theirs in some form; your “ownership” was just that it sat under your account, and even deleting it didn’t remove it from their data.

Web3 adds the missing verb: read, write, and own. The ownership runs on a decentralized, community-backed peer-to-peer network built on a blockchain, rather than on Facebook’s or Google’s servers. That, he explains, is the actual point of NFTs. Digital assets — images, videos — always existed; what was missing was provable ownership of them. An NFT is just a digital asset with a trackable ownership token attached. Muzamil sharpens it: the monkey picture everyone laughed at is a symptom, not the use case. The real utility lands when platforms start refusing uploads that don’t carry a verifiable ownership trail, and route royalties automatically when someone else’s token is used. Both of them are blunt about the froth — when celebrities throw money at something, it spikes, people pile in hoping to double their money overnight, and “that runs like a Ponzi scheme.” The settling, where community-backed currencies and NFTs find their actual value, is the healthy part.

Democratizing the business, not just the consumer

The most interesting turn in the conversation is Muzamil’s, and Talha confirms it. Most coverage of decentralized apps frames the benefit as consumer-side — TBT owns its data, the viewer owns theirs. But the deeper shift, Muzamil argues, is that web3 democratizes the business side. Historically a company is one genius and a product that scales, with power concentrated in a founder and a board. Public markets opened a sliver of that by letting people buy stock, but minority shareholders never really decide anything, and never fly in to cast their small vote. A decentralized network pushes that decision-making into the community itself: if a product turns damaging, the community can change it, rather than one person steering it.

Talha extends it to the infrastructure. Anyone can dedicate servers to a community’s network — virtual or your own machines — bear that cost, and earn a share back in the network’s token for the value provided. You can even build that contribution on rented capacity from Azure, AWS and Google. So a small operator hosting TBT on a decentralized “new YouTube” could plug in a few servers, earn a percentage every time content is accessed, and effectively own a slice of the platform’s plumbing the way they’d buy a tiny stake in a growing company. The cost question — that running something like YouTube is enormously expensive — gets a real answer: the video isn’t hosted in one place but split into chunks across the network, and the community’s actual job over time is optimizing compression and latency so a TBT video plays as well in Nigeria as in the US.

Decentralized finance, and the case against swapping one hegemony for another

Both of them note that the apps get less attention than the money, and DeFi is far more popular than DApps, mostly because of cryptocurrencies. Talha ties this to the changing world order. The standard framing — “dollar hegemony is bad, so move away from it” — too often means moving toward Chinese hegemony instead, and he doesn’t buy it. “You can’t hop from one to another.” The real progression, he argues, is refusing to let any single country decide a protocol that it will inevitably steer. That’s the frame in which Bitcoin starts to make sense to people who distrust both poles. Muzamil adds the institutional tell: financial heavyweights like BlackRock, which once pushed hard to regulate crypto, are now positioning to own a piece of it — because eventually it bypasses them.

Metaverse as a framework, and the headset that’s still version one

When the conversation reaches the metaverse, Talha starts with the history — Neal Stephenson coining the term in a 1992 novel, the 2003 game Second Life giving it a user-generated shape — and then defines it as an immersive, interactive replica of the real world. His examples are concrete and personal: praying at Al-Aqsa or walking the streets of Medina through VR, made real through haptic feedback and gloves that go cold when you touch water; trying on a shirt on an avatar shaped exactly like you before buying it. Crucially, he and Muzamil agree the metaverse is a framework, not a product owned by one company — a more immersive layer over the internet that no one owns and anyone can build on. The danger, Talha notes, is reverting to App Store and Play Store dynamics; if Meta’s marketplace only runs on Meta’s headset, “why are we even talking about web3?”

Muzamil’s real interest isn’t gaming but work. Post-COVID, after the Zoom fatigue and the invasive every-five-seconds-screenshot surveillance, he sees the strongest use case in a virtual office — a cubicle you can sit in, where a colleague can walk over and ask what you’re working on, restoring the intuitive experience the office used to provide. They wander, with obvious enjoyment, into the further future: separating transmission from processing as 5G and 6G arrive, so the heavy compute lives in the cloud and the device is just a display; and Neuralink building sensation directly in the brain a decade or more out, dissolving the need for clunky gear entirely. Both keep returning to a sober point about the present hardware. Apple’s Vision Pro demo looked, to Muzamil, like the first real “iPhone moment” in years — but the headset is still the bulky version one, two-hour battery and all. Talha would rather reach that experience through lighter wearables: glasses, a pendant, light gloves, the way people wear earphones instead of clamping on a headset.

The talent gap, and why no-code changes who gets to build

The conversation closes on Pakistan, where Talha is sharpest because it’s his daily problem. Algorite works on metaverse and game projects for clients across the US, Europe and East Asia, and the recurring use cases are existing web2 games trying to move to web3, and founders starting from games because that’s where imagination starts. But hiring is the bottleneck. Pakistan’s art has improved — he names Lahore studios doing strong work — but the engineering side, the actual building in Unreal, is still weak. The reason is historical: for years the local game industry chased Play Store money through reskinning and cloning, optimizing for quantity over quality, and never developed the finish that real engineering demands.

He and Muzamil are careful to locate the failure correctly. The sloppiness that shows up across Pakistani engineering — in apps, in games — is not a sign the talent can’t do it. It’s a product-owner and project-management failure: someone has to translate a client’s idea into clean, well-scoped work, and someone has to be willing to spend the 500 hours a character’s natural movement actually takes. The hopeful note is no-code. Unreal’s blueprints mean you don’t need a computer-science background to build; you need critical thinking. A strong programmer with no game experience became productive in five to six months; a genuinely sharp newcomer could get there in six to eight months of making, not just learning. Muzamil’s analogy is a 17-year-old who edits video on his phone and, handed Premiere for the first time, produces something a university graduate couldn’t — because the bottleneck was never the tool, it was the mind using it. That, both agree, is where the opportunity sits: a generation that grew up on PUBG and Fortnite, now able to tell their parents that all those hours can become a profession, and to plug into a decade that Muzamil thinks will change how people live far more than the last one did.