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Founder of Nuqtah, the first NFT marketplace in Saudi Arabia, Salwa Radwi is driving the transformation of the country’s new creators’ economy by bridging gaps between the culture, arts, and technology spheres. Unstoppable entrepreneur and an artist herself, she is a key figure working with blockchain technologies with the Ministry of Culture and of Tourism. "Why does someone who loves art still have to do a boring 9-to-5 job? That makes no sense at all!”
When Salwa Radwi asks "Why does someone who loves art still have to do a boring 9-to-5 job?", she's not being rhetorical. She built the infrastructure to make the question answerable - founding Nuqtah, the first NFT marketplace in Saudi Arabia, and working with the Ministry of Culture and Tourism to create new economic models for the country's creative community.
Salwa Radwi is the founder of Nuqtah, the first NFT marketplace in Saudi Arabia, and an artist herself. She has been at the centre of transforming Saudi Arabia's creators' economy - building bridges between culture, technology, and policy through her work with the Ministry of Culture and Tourism. Her practice combines entrepreneurship, blockchain advocacy, and artistic production in a way that reflects both the specific opportunities and constraints of operating at the frontier of a rapidly changing cultural landscape. She is one of the key figures working to ensure that blockchain technologies serve Saudi artists and collectors directly.
The Saudi cultural moment is genuinely unprecedented - a government investing heavily in establishing the country as a cultural destination while a new generation of Saudi artists and entrepreneurs is simultaneously building a creator economy from the ground up. Salwa Radwi sits at that intersection, and this conversation explores what it's like to operate there: the speed of change, the scale of ambition, and the specific challenges of building NFT infrastructure in a context where the tools are new and the audience is developing simultaneously.
Nuqtah and the creator economy
Building the first NFT marketplace in Saudi Arabia required not just technical infrastructure but cultural translation - making the tools legible and relevant to an audience that wasn't already familiar with blockchain. Nuqtah is as much educational infrastructure as commercial platform.
Ministry of Culture collaboration
Working with government on blockchain and NFT adoption reflects the scale at which Saudi Arabia is approaching cultural transformation. Radwi's access to that level of policy engagement is unusual and shapes what's possible.
The artist as entrepreneur
Radwi doesn't separate her artistic practice from her platform-building. Both are expressions of the same conviction: that creative people deserve economic structures that support their work without requiring them to compromise it.
Saudi women and digital art
The female founders and artists driving Saudi digital culture represent one of the most interesting developments in the global ecosystem - a generation building in a context that is changing faster than most can track.
"Why does someone who loves art still have to do a boring 9-to-5 job? That makes no sense at all!"
The Saudi art market is becoming one of the most significant growth areas in the global art world, and digital art is a major part of that story. Collectors who want to understand where the ecosystem is expanding - and who is building the infrastructure for that expansion - need to understand what Radwi is doing and why it matters.
Unlocked is the podcast by 100 collectors - the global network for digital art collectors. Each episode, we speak with artists, curators, collectors, and builders shaping the digital art world. No market speculation. No hype. Just honest, substantive conversations about art, practice, and what it means to collect today. New episodes release throughout the year. Find Unlocked on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. 100 collectors is a membership network. [Explore membership →]
