In a landmark step for Pakistan’s blockchain and AI innovation ecosystem, Vanar — the intelligent Layer-1 blockchain purpose-built for real-world finance — has successfully graduated the first cohort of Web3 startups from its Web3 Leaders Fellowship, a four-month accelerator run in collaboration with Google Cloud.

Bringing together frontier technology, entrepreneurship, and institutional-grade infrastructure, the fellowship fast-tracked eight promising startups working at the intersection of blockchain, artificial intelligence, and user-centered design. Each startup received hands-on mentorship from Vanar’s blockchain engineers and product teams, along with technical infrastructure, Web3 tools, and up to US $25,000 in Google Cloud credits. A further US $25,000 milestone-based grant was awarded by Vanar itself.

Web3 Meets Pakistan’s Innovation Wave

The startups span verticals such as carbon credit trading, decentralized finance (DeFi), and play-to-earn gaming. Over the course of the program, founders participated in code reviews, product clinics, and workshops covering everything from scalable Solidity architecture and tokenomics modeling, to on-chain AI agent design using advanced prompt engineering.

The program culminated in a demo day in Lahore, where founders pitched live to a curated audience of investors, Web3 builders, and ecosystem partners.

“The Fellowship converted months of guesswork into weeks of momentum,” said Anjum Shahzad, CEO of identity management startup Flare ID.

“It connected us with decision-makers that normally take a year of networking to reach,” added Talha bin Afzal of ExoFarm, a play-to-earn gaming platform.

Saad Siddiqui of edtech startup Edversity pointed out the program’s psychological impact: “Building alongside two global leaders forces you to raise your own bar.”

A Strategic Bet on Pakistan’s Digital Future

Pakistan’s digital economy is undergoing a historic transformation. In May, the Ministry of Finance allocated 2GW of surplus electricity for Bitcoin mining and AI data centers, an unprecedented policy move aimed at attracting foreign direct investment and high-tech employment.

Simultaneously, grass-roots adoption continues to surge. Chainalysis ranks Pakistan ninth globally for peer-to-peer crypto adoption, while local communities like Web3 Pak have grown to over 7,000 members across 40 universities, offering a rich talent pipeline for programs like Vanar’s Fellowship.

Scaling Beyond Borders

Vanar’s CEO and co-founder Jawad Ashraf believes this is only the beginning for emerging market builders:

“The graduation proves that frontier founders can leapfrog the traditional development cycle. By combining the high-speed, AI-native Vanar Chain with Google Cloud’s world-class infrastructure, we are helping startups eliminate the old trade-offs between speed, cost, and security.”

He also announced that applications for the 2026 Fellowship will open later this year and will, for the first time, expand to founders from Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Africa, while maintaining a core focus on Pakistan.

About Vanar

Jawad Ashraf – CEO Vanar Chain

Vanar is an AI-native, EVM-compatible Layer-1 blockchain designed for real-world financial applications, including tokenized assets and programmable finance. The Vanar Stack features:

• Kayon: On-chain reasoning engine

• Neutron: Semantic compression layer for live on-chain data queries

• High-throughput, energy-efficient architecture

Backed by partners like Worldpay, Binance, and Stakefish, Vanar operates globally with engineering hubs in Singapore, London, and Lahore, offering builders grants, hackathons, and enterprise-grade infrastructure.

Jawad Ashraf is a veteran technologist and entrepreneur with over 30 years of experience across industries and continents, including the UAE, UK, USA, Turkey, Australia, and Norway

He has successfully built and exited multiple ventures, including steering The Entertainer Dubai through a $100 million exit.

The post Vanar and Google Cloud Power Next-Gen Web3 Startups in Pakistan appeared first on Techlist.

Before trying to turn your head around blockchain technology, it is important to understand why it is important. In our view, blockchain is important because today’s increasingly centralized economies have significant disadvantages:

Distrust: We can freely exchange and exchange information (thanks to today’s Internet), we cannot easily exchange and change the value without going to a third party.

Necessary intermediaries lose confidence: 92% of millionaires (2.5 billion people) do not trust centralized financial institutions because the privacy of their data is compromised or threatened by security breaches.

Billions of people are excluded: many have no access to basic financial services and cannot participate in the global economy.

Slow transaction processing speed: It can take days or weeks for value to move from one country to another or from one financial institution to another within the same country.

Incompetence: financial transaction costs account for 6% of global GDP, costing more than $ 4 trillion worldwide.

We believe that open-source blockchain technology has the potential to make the global resource economy safer, more open, and transparent. Algorand is a completely unlicensed and decentralized public block. Users do not need the consent of any trusted authority to join the network and participate in the protocol. Anyone can exchange blockchain technologies and participate in module creation. The data is public, so each participant can read each volume. Each participant can write a transaction in a future volume.

Why is blockchain technology not widely accepted?

Existing blockchain solutions want to solve the above problems. However, they are slow or permissible. Slow blockchains cannot handle the number of transactions that flow into the economy every day. Allowed blockchains to accumulate power in the hands of a few players and cannot change the arrival of new participants. There is only one type of user in the Algorand blockchain technologies. Because Algorand’s protocol is based on pure evidence, no user or group of users can distinguish themselves from the protocol.

Each user can play any role in the protocol according to their role. All users who own Alcos and are online are automatically eligible to participate in all activities of the protocol, including proposing constituencies and voting in constituencies.

How does Algorand solve the above problems?

Algorand is the first blockchain that can be measured and approved. This allows for many benefits, in particular:

Trust: Trust is built from diffusion and cryptographic tools that ensure the invariability of the partition ledger. By participating by consensus any user can contribute to the security of the decentralized network. Digital assets are not stored in one central location but are distributed throughout the world ledger using the highest level of cryptography.

Transaction: Anyone can submit new transactions and read the full history of transactions.

Speed: Users can transact almost instantly with anyone around the world.

Minimum processing costs: Algorand reduces the cost of calculating blockchain participation. Accordingly, transaction costs may be lower.

Algorand’s Smart Contracts (ASC1) removes these barriers with proven performance as a reliable, seamless solution that is not only fast, scalable, and cost-effective, but also functionally advanced to implement the sophisticated and complex application. Algorand’s smart contracts (ASC1s) are trusted programs that run on a chain where users can trust that the program runs flawlessly, and the results are not corrupted. They integrate with Algorand Tier-1 and get the same powerful speed, size, finish, and protection as the Algorand operating system, and they are inexpensive and error-free.

ASC1s can automate custom rules and logics from defining how complex property application logic and assets can be converted to flow. ASC1s are written in a new language as Transaction Execution Approval Language (TEAL) and Python, Python language binding. Algorand has developed a technology to eliminate friction in funds, and generally creates the exchange of non-friction value with a cognitive view of the type of property.

The technology of Algorand

The technology of Algorand is intended to help fill the divide in the conventional financial environment by introducing modern technologies. Not unexpectedly, with Algorand’s Layer-1 Standard Properties, Smart Contracts, and absolute Atomic Swaps, the result was a proliferation of use cases that rapidly shifted to the Algorand blockchain protocol because of its functionality and ease of execution.

The technology of Algorand is intended to help fill the divide in the conventional financial environment by introducing modern technologies. Not unexpectedly, with Algorand’s Layer-1 Standard Properties, Smart Contracts, and absolute Atomic Swaps, the result was a proliferation of use cases that rapidly migrated to the Algorand blockchain protocol because of its functionality and ease of execution.

Furthermore, while no blockchain technologies will guarantee that during a partition, blocks are written to the chain, Algorand will recover shortly after the partition is resolved and ensures that new blocks are created at the same speed as before the partition. The nodes reach partition recovery mode after a group of Algorand nodes see little improvement for a while (approximately a little more time than it takes to settle on one block).

In this state, the nodes regularly send out recovery messages, in addition to continuing the consensus protocol. These messages are not correctly propagated during a partition. However, once the partition has resolved, these messages are instantly propagated, and until a requisite message threshold is accumulated, the node states are realigned and the blockchain begins to move forward. This enables Algorand to recover from partitions almost instantaneously.

The use and debate of blockchain technologies and digital asset technology have been accelerated by these developments, the growth of Blockchain interoperability for permissioned and permission less protocols, along with the unfortunate incidence of Covid-19.

The post Algorand: Innovation in Blockchain Technologies appeared first on Techlist.

When people think of blockchain technology it usually starts and ends with bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. It’s logical since much of the news is focused around the surge in the exchange rate of bitcoin. Many simply ask how to open a bitcoin account in Pakistan, or how to convert cryptocurrency to cash.

Yet, there are so many opportunities to make money with blockchain that go unnoticed since it has nothing to do with trading cryptocurrency. If you are an entrepreneur then the blockchain is like the Wild West right now and offers a lot of opportunity.

One such area is data storage. This is a big concern for small businesses to large multinational ones. And with privacy concerns and the vulnerability of the cloud, many are turning to the blockchain for answers. This presents a unique chance to those that are looking for a potentially lucrative business opportunity.

What is decentralized cloud storage?

When people think of the cloud, they often are reminded that the cloud is simply a server. When you send data or files to the cloud, it is not hovering somewhere in the atmosphere, but just in a server or complex of servers somewhere.

When the cloud is decentralized it means that it is using blockchain technology so it acts just like the traditional cloud in terms of the front end user experience, but on the backend it exists in millions of computers.

The way the blockchain works is that transactions are registered on a ledger that is found in all the different computers and servers that are using that particular blockchain. Which means that it can’t be hacked since changing a block would be immediately seen by the users that are hosting the blockchain on their server.

There is also no one particular company that is controlling the data as, again, it is not hosted by any one particular server or company.

How to set up storage

If you aren’t a developer yourself, then you’ll need to hire a team as the system is very complex. However, once you have your team assembled they will be tasked with building and managing a database on a particular blockchain. Right now, the Ethereum chain allows for decentralized apps and other programming features so you will likely look there first rather than creating your own blockchain.

Next, you’ll need to create a peer to peer network so you will have the people looking to store their data able to upload the files and the so called farmers that will be storing it having the ability to download it.

The developers will need to have the entire process encrypted for security so this is the most important part of the job.

Then, once you have your network up and running it is time to find people looking for a secure and fast decentralized cloud storage solution. At this point, you’ll need to hire a marketing team to get the word out there to drum up clients.

The post How To Start A Decentralized Cloud Storage Business appeared first on Techlist.