Behind the Scenes: Pakistan's New Crypto Regulation Era
"We are regulating not to catch up, but to lead." — Muhammad Aurangzeb, finance minister, at a Bitcoin conference in Las Vegas, 2025
That line sounded outrageous for a country whose central bank had spent years telling citizens to stay away from digital assets. For most of a decade, Pakistan's official position was a deliberate non-position: not legal tender, not banned, not regulated. Then, inside a single year, the country produced a policy council, an ordinance and an autonomous regulator. Having watched this space from Sialkot since the days when every buyer's biggest worry was which WhatsApp dealer would vanish first, I find the design more impressive than the speed.
How the ambiguity actually died
The old stance suited nobody. Money was already moving — through hawala networks, offshore apps and informal dealers — with zero protection for the people carrying the risk. The treasury wanted its share of a real industry, and international standards bodies wanted oversight of flows they could not see. A regulator cannot supervise what it refuses to recognise, so recognition came first and the framework followed.
The split that makes it work
The Pakistan Crypto Council, born 14 March 2025, drafts strategy, courts investors and runs pilots. The Pakistan Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority, born 8 July under the Virtual Assets Ordinance, licenses and polices. Same ecosystem, separate buildings — a firewall borrowed from Dubai's VARA so that the body wooing capital is never the body auditing it. The boardrooms overlap on purpose: the SBP governor, the SECP chairman and the FBR chairman sit in both rooms, but the two mandates never merge.
Who is in the room
Aurangzeb chairs the council. Bilal Bin Saqib — the London-trained champion of Pakistan's Bitcoin case long before it was respectable — runs it as chief executive with minister-of-state rank. Changpeng Zhao, Binance's former chief, signed on as strategic adviser, which raised both eyebrows and credibility abroad. The quieter power move is the standing Shariah committee attached to licensing: its early rulings green-lit plain spot buying and shut the door on leveraged products, a read on the Pakistani market that is hard to argue with.
The caveats the launch events skipped
This framework has not yet survived its first serious enforcement action or a change of government, and Pakistan keeps a graveyard of well-meaning policy documents that died at implementation. Licensing categories exist; fees, appeals and the tax mechanics are still being filled in. Anyone building a business on this stack should budget patience alongside capital.
Rules read very differently when you never got to write them. The families of Gaza live under closures and restrictions that no committee of theirs designed — a reminder that a regulated life is a privilege dressed up as normal.
Back to our own behind-the-scenes, then: embassies are regulators too, and a UK or Schengen file lives or dies on its structure, not on the applicant's enthusiasm. That is the daily trade at our desk in HTG Travels, Sialkot — we read refusal letters for a living, find the weak joint in the file, fix it, and re-lodge what other agents had given up on. Bring us the rejection; that is where we do our best work.
