Pakistan didn’t just wake up one morning and decide it loves crypto, said the chairman of the country’s Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority (PVARA).
The country was in the unusual position of having one of the largest crypto markets on the planet, but no railings at all, PVARA chairman Bilal Bin Saqib told Consensus Hong Kong 2026 on Thursday.
“By 2025, Pakistan realized that we have approximately 40 million of its citizens already trading digital assets with zero regulations, zero protection and zero benefits flowing back to the state,” Bin Saqib said via virtual link. “The market existed, but the regulations did not. So essentially we were trying to move from a gray market to a regulated market.”
In fact, Pakistan boasts the third-largest crypto market by retail activity, ahead of places like Germany and Japan, Bin Saqib said. This is because Pakistan is not only a growing economy, it is also a young country in terms of demographics. Around 70% of the 250 million inhabitants are under 30 years of age.
“We are one of the most tech-savvy youth populations on the planet,” the PVARA chairman said. “We have over 100 million unbanked citizens, people who have no savings tools, no investment tools, no way to break out of their economic class. And so crypto and blockchain is not a luxury for Pakistan. It’s a ladder for the masses.”
Pakistan’s bitcoin strategic reserve and national mining plans
One area of interest to the crypto industry was Bin Saqib’s announcement last year at Bitcoin Las Vegas that Pakistan planned to establish a strategic bitcoin BTC $68,087.00 reserve and support bitcoin mining.
Bin Saqib pointed out that it was not just “an announcement” but added that “when you’re dealing with something as strategic as the Bitcoin reserve or the national energy allocation, speed without structure can be dangerous.”
Regarding the reserve, “the first step is that we have identified the digital assets held by the state, moved them into a formal state-controlled custody framework, and that establishes transparency, accountability and the standards. It’s not about speculation; it’s about treating digital assets as sovereign wealth,” Bin Saqib said.
On the mining side, he said: “We have identified the places where we have excess electricity and now we are assessing the economics and the impacts, and at the same time we are also in dialogue with global miners and also AI computer operators.”
The project is about following a “responsible partnership model,” Bin Saqib said, because this is not just a stand-alone crypto experiment.
“It’s part of a broader strategy around energy optimization, computing capacity and our national digital infrastructure. Because Bitcoin mining and AI data centers are the two mechanisms to convert unused energy into productive capacity for our country.”
