Dr. Saj Khoshroo

Dr. Saj Khoshroo is a lawyer who works at the intersection of financial regulation and digital assets. He completed a doctorate at the University of Oxford, awarded in 2018, with a thesis titled "Islamic finance: the convergence of faith, capital, and power", which examined Islamic project finance as a negotiated compromise among stakeholders representing faith, capital and power. The research was carried out through the Faculty of Law's Centre for Socio-Legal Studies and drew on the industry's own participants.

By November 2025 Khoshroo was Chief Legal Officer at Midnight, the privacy-focused blockchain network. Reporting on that month's Midnight Summit, The Fintech Times recorded him setting out the human fallout of current compliance practice: sanctions rules that trap refugees, "lazy" de-risking by banks, and place-of-birth flags that shadow people for years. His argument was that privacy-preserving attestations, which let someone prove a fact about themselves without disclosing the underlying data, could avoid that fallout rather than weaken the checks.

Proof of Talk's programme billed Khoshroo as Chief Legal Officer of the Midnight Foundation, the organisation launched in May 2025 to support the growth of the Midnight blockchain ecosystem through open-source tooling, education and targeted funding. He spoke at Proof of Talk Paris 2026 on 2 June, on the Taostats Stage, on a panel titled "Privacy and Compliance: Two Sides of the Same Coin" that ran from 12:30 to 13:05 on the first day of the edition. He shared that panel with James Smith, Jody Mettler and Jens Hachmeister; Nicola Massella moderated it.

The Midnight Foundation has continued to operate through 2026: in March it announced a partnership with the UK digital bank Monument to tokenise retail customer deposits on the Midnight network, the sort of regulated-institution use case Khoshroo's compliance argument is addressed to. He also writes publicly on digital assets, including on institutional demand for Bitcoin exchange-traded funds.