Yehia Badawy

"It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that."

Through the Looking-Glass, Lewis Carroll

 

Yehia Badawy is a serial entrepreneur and consultant based in the Middle East. He is a co-founder of Rain, the first central bank licensed cryptocurrency platform in the Middle East. Yehia is also the founder of Digital Cotton, a business and innovation consulting company.

 

It was in the US that Yehia got to know more about digital currency and recognized the opportunities it presented. He started getting involved in FinTech through a number of startups and on his return to Egypt in 2014 he brought his experience in the US back to the Middle East, where it was still very new. He organized the Cairo Bitcoin Meetup, one of the first digital currency meetups in the region, and in 2015 he set up Digital Cotton, the first blockchain consulting company in Egypt. A play on Egyptian cotton which is renowned for its quality, Digital Cotton offers research and consulting services to blue chip companies, start-ups, and educational institutions. They actively help start-ups branch out of the region into other markets, such as Europe and North America. In 2016 his core passion, education, drove him to start Camp Altitude, a computer programming camp for kids and teens.

 

Having been a frontrunner in the region, Yehia quickly became known as an expert on digital currencies. He believes that digital currencies are ‘here to stay’ and is driven by a vision of them becoming ubiquitous, a normal part of everyday life.

 

Yehia attained a bachelor’s degree in accounting from Cairo University, before traveling to the United States and studying for a master’s degree in international business from HULT International Business School in San Francisco.