LAHORE/HONG KONG: Minister of State and Chairman of the Pakistan Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority, Bilal bin Saqib, has said Pakistan is ready for future technology and the digital economy.
Addressing the Bitcoin Asia conference in Hong Kong, Bilal bin Saqib said Pakistan is moving forward to understand new financial and technological changes and to build its own capacity.
He said Pakistan established a regulatory system for virtual assets in less than six months, using only 8 per cent of the budget allocated for the purpose.
According to Bilal bin Saqib, approximately $200,000 was spent on constructing the new regulatory framework and making it operational, while roughly 92 per cent of the approved budget went unused.
He said Pakistan’s effort with regard to a Bitcoin strategic reserve is to prepare the country for the financial system of the future, rather than to purchase Bitcoin in large quantities.
The Pakistan Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority was created to bring digital-asset activity — exchanges, custody, tokenisation and related services — under a licensing regime, ending a long period in which cryptocurrency occupied an ambiguous legal position in Pakistan. For years the State Bank had directed regulated financial institutions not to deal in virtual currencies, while millions of Pakistanis traded on offshore platforms outside any domestic supervisory framework.
That gap mattered for two reasons. It left retail investors without recourse when platforms failed, and it complicated Pakistan’s obligations under the Financial Action Task Force standards, which require countries to supervise virtual asset service providers for anti-money-laundering purposes. Pakistan’s exit from the FATF grey list in 2022 came with continuing commitments in this area.
The underspend claim is the most quotable line from the address and the one that should be examined most carefully. Standing up a regulator for roughly $200,000 is remarkable — and it is worth asking what a regulator built at that cost can actually do. Supervision of digital-asset firms is technically demanding work requiring blockchain analytics capability, forensic accounting skills and staff who can be paid competitively against the private sector. Low set-up cost is a genuine efficiency claim; it can also be a description of a body that is not yet resourced to supervise.
The framing of the strategic reserve is the more substantively interesting statement, and it is more cautious than the phrase “Bitcoin strategic reserve” usually implies. Bilal bin Saqib’s formulation — readiness rather than accumulation — steps back from the idea of a state building a large speculative position in a volatile asset, which would be difficult to justify for a country managing external account pressure and IMF programme conditionality. A sovereign holding of a highly volatile instrument produces mark-to-market swings on the national balance sheet that a stabilising economy does not need.
What remains unanswered publicly is the operational detail: what the reserve holds, who has custody, under what statutory authority it is held, and how it is audited.
-with additional unputs from APP.
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