The Good Tech Companies - Faisal Al-Monai and the Rise of Tokenized Infrastructure in Saudi Arabia

Episode Date: April 27, 2025

This story was originally published on HackerNoon at: https://hackernoon.com/faisal-al-monai-and-the-rise-of-tokenized-infrastructure-in-saudi-arabia. Faisal Al-Monai and droppGroup are quietly building Saudi Arabia’s future with tokenized economies, AI agents, and sovereign digital infrastructure. Check more stories related to web3 at: https://hackernoon.com/c/web3. You can also check exclusive content about #tokenization-in-saudi-arabia, #faisal-al-monai, #web3-infrastructure, #sovereign-digital-id, #ai-native-systems, #programmable-economy, #vision-2030-tech, #good-company, and more. This story was written by: @jonstojanjournalist. Learn more about this writer by checking @jonstojanjournalist's about page, and for more stories, please visit hackernoon.com. Faisal Al-Monai, founder of droppGroup, is revolutionizing Saudi Arabia’s digital landscape with AI-native, blockchain-based infrastructure. From tokenizing national systems to enabling sovereign digital IDs and real-world asset trading, his work powers smart cities and programmable economies—setting a global blueprint for Web3-era governance.

This audio is presented by Hacker Noon, where anyone can learn anything about any technology. Faisal El-Munai and the rise of tokenized infrastructure in Saudi Arabia, by John Stoyan Journalist. While Silicon Valley made noise, Faisal El-Munai built silence into power. For over two decades, this Saudi technologist has operated behind the curtain, designing digital infrastructure not for likes or funding rounds, but to rewire the kingdom's most vital systems. His tools, patience, precision, and an uncanny ability to see decades ahead of the curve. Today, as the world chases hype around AI and web 3, Feisal's work is already live, trusted by sovereigns, adopted by Fortune 500 companies and quietly becoming a blueprint for global transformation.

He calls it, the system that the next generation will take for granted. His clients call it Drop Group. The $100 billion beginning long before blockchain entered public discourse, Faisal was already building the rails for Saudi Arabia's digital economy. As the founder and CEO of SSSIT, he created a middleware system that connected SADAD, the national bill settlement platform, to every operating bank and government agency. That system now processes over $100 billion plus USD annually, he didn't stop there. His team engineered a correspondence management platform that over 50 Saudi government agencies

still rely on today, custom-built for the nuanced operational needs of the kingdom. And when Microsoft, Oracle and HP needed leadership in the public sector, Faisal stepped in, managing their critical portfolios, even managing three meetings with Bill Gates, including one between Gates and King Abdullah himself. The thread through it all? Build quietly, scale intentionally, leave permanence. Web3feet s best kept secret in 2017, Faisal co-founded Dropgroup, an enterprise Web3 and AI infrastructure company based in Miami, but deeply embedded in the Middle East's digital

transformation. Over the past seven years, it's become what insiders call, the invisible engine behind a new internet. Dropgroup's flagship product, Dropone, is no ordinary technological system. It's an AI-native, quantum-resilient infrastructure platform designed for governments and enterprises to operate in a world where AI agents transact. Identities are decentralized and economies no longer need intermediaries. With deployments spanning the governments of Saudi Arabia and Qatar, Saudi Aramco, Cisco and Oracle, Dropone is in theory, its innovation in practice. Think sovereign digital ID, AI agents negotiating real-time contracts, real-world assets like energy being tokenized and national data rails stitched into smart city backbones. Dropone was never about riding a wave, Faisal notes. It was about building something carefully that would outlive the next century's computational arms race. Your future, tokenized at its core,

Dropone enables a new kind of economy, where digital agents can trade, collaborate, and enforce trust without permission. It's a world where citizens own their data, machines act on behalf of humans and blockchain becomes a practical tool for trust and transparency. The architecture supports greater than 500,000 TPS, seamlessly bridges on-premise enterprise environments with public blockchains. Every AI agent has a wallet. Every transaction is programmable. Every interaction, sovereign. This is not speculative infrastructure. It's post-hype technology with pre-hype execution.

The Saudi blueprint for the world what Faisal and Dropgroup have accomplished in Saudi is more than national innovation. It's a template for how nations can leap into the future. As Vision 2030 accelerates, Dropgroup is proving what's possible when technology i spurpass build, not retrofitted. And while others are pitching tokenization, Faisal and drop are already tokenizing commodities, cities and citizenship itself. From Riyadh to San Francisco, governments and fortune 500 companies are now looking to the kingdom. Not just as an oil powerhouse, but as the testbed for programmable economies and AI-driven governance. The last quiet era is ending Faisal Al Manai is not interested in the press.

He's interested in permanence, but permanence has a habit of attracting attention. As AI and Web3 converge, DropGroup's technology, designed in silence, is becoming essential infrastructure. For identity, for trust, for value. So if you're wondering where the future is being built, don't look to the loudest founders. Look to the ones who don't need to speak to be heard. Drop Group has already built what others are still trying to define. And Faisal El-Munai has already helped a nation leap into the future.

Now he's bringing the rest of the world with him. Thank you for listening to this Hacker Noon story, read by Artificial Intelligence. Visit HackerNoon.com to read, write, learn and publish.