Pakistan has quietly crossed an important threshold. After laying the legal foundation for a regulated ecosystem for digital assets through the Digital Nation Pakistan Act and the Virtual Asset Regulatory Ordinance earlier this year, the Pakistan Virtual Asset Regulatory Authority (PVARA) began accepting license applications for crypto exchanges on December 2.
That shift was underlined at the highest levels of the state on December 6 when Binance Global CEO Richard Teng met in Islamabad with senior politicians along with Prime Minister Muhammad Shehbaz Sharif and COAS-CDF Field Marshal Syed Asim Munir.
The engagement reflected not market curiosity but institutional intent: a recognition that issues of money, payments and digital value now lie alongside national economic and security priorities.
In practical terms, this means that over time it will become easier, cleaner and more compatible to buy bitcoin through regulated local payment rails.
This is a remarkable development, arriving at a familiar moment of fear. Bitcoin prices have fallen again. Critics are vocal. Headlines speak of exhaustion, excess and the end of the cycle. Payouts are accelerating. Self-confidence falters. Fear once again dominates the conversation.
But history offers perspective. Similar periods of pessimism marked the closing stages of the previous four-year bitcoin cycles: from 2014 to 2017 and again from 2018 to 2021. Seen through that lens, the currency cycle that began in 2022 is not collapsing; it matures.
Focusing solely on price action obscures the deeper problem. The real risk is not bitcoin’s volatility. It is the financial system that bitcoin was created to question. Nowhere is the failure of the system more visible than in Pakistan. At its core, this failure manifests itself through inflation: a process that is widely misunderstood and routinely misdescribed. Inflation is often explained by rising prices.
This description is practical and incomplete. Prices are not the cause of inflation; they are its effect. Inflation begins with the continued expansion of the money supply. As currency is created year after year, the purchasing power of each unit decreases. Savers quietly lose. Wages lag. The standard of living is eroding.
In Pakistan, the consequences are everywhere. Food, fuel, rent and education cost more every year: not because they themselves have become more valuable, but because the currency that measures them buys less. The result is a population trapped in short-term thinking: working harder, saving less, and constantly feeling behind.
Crucially, this erosion occurs without transparency or consent. A small group controls the monetary system. Everyone else must ask permission to use their own money through banks and intermediaries. Profits are privatized. Loss is socialized. Asset bubbles form, crises follow, and wealth is further concentrated at the top.
No matter how hard most people work, the value of their earnings will continue to erode unless they gain access to pre-inflation assets or become part of the system itself. Pakistan’s recurring economic crises are not isolated national failures; they are local expressions of a global monetary order that rewards access over effort. This is the silent failure of money.
Which brings us to the alternative. Bitcoin enters this landscape not as an investment pitch, but as a monetary alternative. It is decentralized and returns agency to individuals. It acts as an equalizer in societies increasingly fractured by economic stress and anger. Its properties are straightforward.
Bitcoin has a fixed supply of 21 million coins, permanently limited. No central authority can extend it. No political emergency can dilute it. Its rules are enforced by code rather than discretion, and its security rests on energy and mathematics, not faith in institutions.
While bitcoin is often dismissed as volatile, this volatility has played out within a clear long-term upward trajectory while its underlying fundamentals have remained unchanged. Over longer horizons, it has been the best-performing asset over the past decade. More revealing, however, is what happens when items are priced in bitcoin rather than local currency.
Housing, technology and productive assets often become cheaper over time: not because the value disappears, but because the money to measure it improves.
In 2012, a modest home in Islamabad for a few million rupees would have required thousands of bitcoins. Today, the same property may cost tens of millions of rupees, yet only a single digit amount of bitcoin. The house did not change. The currency did.
For Pakistan, a country where money not only underperforms but also routinely collapses as a store of value, and where degradation is felt long before it is formally acknowledged, this distinction is important. Regulation does not validate bitcoin’s price, nor does it eliminate risk.
What it does is legitimize access. As compatible frameworks take shape and local rails develop, bitcoin is increasingly encountered not as a speculative instrument but as a savings technology that competes directly with a currency that has struggled to maintain purchasing power.
This matters most to a younger generation priced out of real estate, locked out of traditional asset classes and increasingly skeptical of institutions that promise stability but deliver erosion. Bitcoin does not require title deeds, brokerage accounts or political proximity. It just requires time, discipline and a long-term horizon.
Bitcoin makes no guarantees. It involves a real risk. But it restores something modern money has quietly taken away: the choice to opt out of a system designed to dilute by default. In a world where money has quietly failed its most basic functions, that choice may be the most powerful function of all.
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Pakinomist.tv’s editorial policy.
The author is an Islamabad-based lawyer and strategic legal advisor at HP | FKM. She can be reached at: [email protected]
Originally published in The News
