Pakistani technology entrepreneur and crypto trader Waqar Zaka has won the WEEX TradFi Masters, a global multi asset trading championship, after outperforming more than 3,000 participants from around the world using his own capital and posting a 74 percent return over a 20 day trading window.

The competition, organised by the international cryptocurrency exchange WEEX, brought together solo traders from Pakistan, China, South Korea, the United States, Japan and several other countries, all trading with real money rather than demo accounts. Each of the leading participants started with $100,000 in capital, and contestants were required to trade across a wide spread of asset classes, including stocks, gold, silver, commodities and cryptocurrencies, through a single unified platform. There were no teams, no referral incentives and no promotional targets built into the contest, a structure organisers said was designed specifically to test how well an individual trader could adapt across different markets rather than simply ride one asset’s momentum.

By the end of the 20 day window, Zaka had grown his account to $174,000, a gain of $74,000, placing him first on the leaderboard. A trader from South Korea finished second with a 57 percent return, translating to $57,000 in profit, while a competitor from China rounded out the podium in third place with a 35 percent gain worth $35,000. Rankings in the tournament were not based purely on raw profit. Organisers used a composite scoring system that weighed overall profitability alongside trading volume, consistency and risk discipline, and by that measure Zaka’s performance stood out further still, with his total trading volume reported at more than 42.5 million USDT across the contest, the highest of any participant.

As the overall winner, Zaka was presented with a brand new 2026 Mercedes Benz G Wagon at a prize ceremony held in Dubai. Images and footage of the handover circulated widely on Pakistani social media within hours, with the win being described by several commentators as a rare moment of individual recognition for a Pakistani competitor on a global financial stage typically dominated by traders from East Asia, Europe and North America.

The victory represents a marked improvement on Zaka’s previous outings in similar international contests. He had finished eighth in a comparable WEEX tournament the year before, a result he has spoken about publicly as a source of frustration given how close he had come to the podium without breaking into the top three. In the current edition of the TradFi Masters, reports from the early rounds had him sitting in as low as fifth place with roughly a week still to play, before he moved up to fourth and then, in the final stretch of the competition, overtook the remaining leaders to finish first. Traders and analysts following the leaderboard in real time described his late surge as one of the more dramatic turnarounds of the tournament, with his position shifting significantly in the closing days as he adjusted his exposure across asset classes.

Organisers of the WEEX TradFi Masters congratulated Zaka on the official handover, framing the event as part of a broader trend in which competitive online trading is increasingly being treated as a skill based pursuit in its own right, closer in structure to competitive gaming than to conventional investing. Under this framing, traders are judged not simply on whether they made money but on the strategy behind their positioning, their mathematical reading of volatile markets, their adaptability across unrelated asset classes and the discipline with which they managed risk over a fixed and relatively short window. Officials involved in running the contest have argued that this format offers a more meaningful test of trading skill than single asset competitions, since it forces participants to demonstrate competence in equities, precious metals, commodities and digital assets simultaneously rather than specialising in one.

This is not Zaka’s first high profile result in a WEEX linked event this year. In February, he was named Top Live Trader of WEEX after growing an identical starting sum of $100,000 to $531,000 within 48 hours during a period of extreme cryptocurrency market turbulence. That earlier contest ran during one of the sharpest crypto market downturns of the year, with Bitcoin, Ethereum and other major digital assets losing more than a fifth of their value in a single day and billions of dollars wiped off the broader market as traders around the world rushed to close positions. WEEX at the time credited Zaka with continuing to trade live and profitably through the crash while a large share of the field pulled out of the market altogether, a performance the exchange held up as evidence of disciplined trading under pressure rather than simple luck.

Zaka has been a fixture of Pakistan’s cryptocurrency scene for close to a decade, and his profile in the space predates the current wave of mainstream interest in digital assets in the country by several years. He is widely credited with introducing Bitcoin to a Pakistani audience in 2015, when he began producing educational content about the currency at a time when it traded at roughly $260, or about PKR 25,000 at the prevailing exchange rate. That early content is frequently cited as having shaped the first generation of Pakistani cryptocurrency traders, many of whom have said they first encountered the concept of digital assets through his videos rather than through mainstream financial media. In 2017 he went further, introducing live public trading in Pakistan and announcing his positions in real time, a practice he has said was intended to promote transparency in an industry that was, and in some respects remains, poorly understood by regulators and the general public alike.

Beyond his trading career, Zaka has taken on a more formal advisory role in Pakistan’s engagement with digital assets. He was appointed by the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa provincial government to assist with cryptocurrency and blockchain related initiatives, a role that has placed him at the intersection of private trading activity and public policy discussions on how Pakistan should approach the regulation of digital currencies. He has argued publicly, including in television appearances dating back to 2019, that Pakistan should consider building a national Bitcoin reserve, and has floated the idea of a digital rupee backed partly by Bitcoin holdings, suggesting that countries which accumulate significant cryptocurrency reserves early could gain a lasting advantage in a digital economy. These positions have drawn both support and scepticism within Pakistan’s financial commentariat, given the State Bank of Pakistan’s historically cautious stance on cryptocurrency trading and the absence of a clear legal framework governing digital assets in the country.

Zaka’s supporters have also pointed to his use of cryptocurrency for humanitarian purposes as part of his broader public profile, citing earlier instances in which he used Bitcoin donations to provide direct support to refugee communities in Myanmar and Syria, at a time when conventional donation channels were difficult to access in those regions.

His latest win adds to a growing, if still relatively small, list of Pakistani individuals gaining recognition in international financial technology and trading circles. It comes at a moment when competitive online trading tournaments of this kind are drawing larger fields and greater attention globally, positioning events like the WEEX TradFi Masters somewhere between traditional finance and the world of competitive esports. For Pakistan specifically, the win has renewed a familiar debate in financial and policy circles over how the country should treat cryptocurrency trading, given that individual traders such as Zaka continue to achieve high profile international results even as the broader regulatory environment for digital assets in Pakistan remains unsettled.

Whether Zaka’s win translates into any shift in that regulatory conversation remains to be seen, though his profile within Pakistan’s cryptocurrency community, already substantial before this result, is likely to grow further as a consequence of the win and the international attention it has attracted.