By Staff Reporter
ISLAMABAD: Pakistan told United Nations member states to stop deliberating over digital assets and start building the regulatory architecture to govern them, with the head of the country’s crypto authority casting the choice in stark terms: govern the technology now, or be governed by it later.
Bilal Bin Saqib, Pakistan’s Minister of State and Chairman of the Pakistan Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority, delivered the message in a virtual keynote to a UN Headquarters briefing on September 10 titled “Digital Assets and Blockchain for Sustainable Development: Advancing Digital Finance through Innovation.” Pakistan’s UN mission convened the session with the UN Development Programme, the UN Conference on Trade and Development, and the Office of the Secretary-General’s Envoy on Technology.
“The question before this room is not whether these technologies will scale,” Bin Saqib told the gathering of member states, UN agencies and industry participants. “They will. The question is: who will shape them, and in whose interest?”
The remarks carry more weight than they might have from another government. Pakistan banned cryptocurrency outright in 2018, when the State Bank barred lenders from facilitating crypto transactions over financial-stability concerns — a position the central bank reaffirmed as recently as 2024. The reversal since then has been unusually fast. The government formed the Pakistan Crypto Council in early 2025 and named Bin Saqib its chief executive; by July, a presidential ordinance had established PVARA as a dedicated regulator; by March 2026, parliament had passed the Virtual Assets Act, making the authority permanent and giving it power to license and supervise exchanges, token issuers and custodial services, with unlicensed operators facing fines and prison time. In April, the State Bank formally lifted its eight-year banking ban, allowing lenders to open accounts for PVARA-licensed firms under strict conditions. PVARA has since issued no-objection certificates to Binance and HTX to begin operating in the country, and Pakistan and Binance signed a memorandum in December to explore tokenising up to $2 billion in bonds, treasury bills and commodity reserves.
Pakistan now ranks as the world’s third-largest crypto market by user count, behind only India and the United States, according to industry estimates — a notable standing for a country that spent most of the past decade treating the asset class as illegal.
Bin Saqib framed Saturday’s remarks less around that domestic turnaround than around global financial exclusion. He pointed to the roughly 1.4 billion adults worldwide who remain outside the formal banking system, plus a larger population that participates on unequal terms — paying steep remittance fees, enduring slow settlement, and facing limited access to credit.
He singled out remittance costs as a concrete failure point: sending $200 across borders still costs more than double the 3% ceiling set under UN Sustainable Development Goal target 10.c. Narrowing that gap, he said, would redirect billions of dollars a year back to the families who depend on those transfers.
Bin Saqib argued digital finance’s development case extends beyond payments. Digital identity systems and verifiable financial histories, he said, could let small businesses, farmers and women entrepreneurs demonstrate economic activity without the collateral or paperwork traditional lenders require. Tokenization could open new channels for capital formation by breaking large assets — infrastructure bonds, renewable energy projects — into smaller, tradable units, while distributed ledgers could add transparency to public spending and supply chains. He also pointed to potential uses in development finance, subsidies, aid disbursement and climate finance, provided they come with safeguards against illicit finance and losses.
He was careful to temper the pitch with caution, flagging risks including retail-investor volatility, illicit finance, and the concentration of power among a small number of players — plus a widening gap between countries with the regulatory capacity to manage these tools and those without it.
“The choice before every member state is not regulate or don’t regulate,” he said. “It is simpler, and starker, than that: to govern the future, or be governed by it.”
His broader argument was about timing and tone as much as substance. Regulation introduced too late, he warned, fails consumers and markets that have already moved on without it; regulation built primarily out of fear tends to push activity into less transparent corners rather than eliminating it. The lesson he drew from jurisdictions that have already legislated in this space is that rules work best when designed to build markets rather than block them.
Pakistan’s ambassador to the UN, Asim Ahmad, closed the session by calling for international cooperation, capacity-building and technical assistance, and said the UN could help member states navigate what he called a rapidly evolving digital landscape.
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