Pakistan has quietly crossed an important threshold. After laying the legal foundations for a regulated digital-assets ecosystem through the Digital Nation Pakistan Act and the Virtual Asset Regulatory Ordinance earlier this year, the Pakistan Virtual Asset Regulatory Authority (PVARA) began accepting licence applications for crypto exchanges on December 2.
That shift was underscored at the highest levels of the state on December 6, when Binance Global CEO Richard Teng met in Islamabad with senior policymakers, alongside Prime Minister Muhammad Shehbaz Sharif and COAS-CDF Field Marshal Syed Asim Munir.
The engagement reflected not market curiosity, but institutional intent: an acknowledgement that questions of money, payments and digital value now sit alongside national economic and security priorities.
In practical terms, this means that, in due course, buying bitcoin through regulated local payment rails will become easier, cleaner and compliant.
This is a notable development, arriving at a familiar moment of fear. Bitcoin prices are down again. Critics are loud. Headlines speak of exhaustion, excess, and the end of the cycle. Cash-outs accelerate. Confidence wobbles. Fear, once again, dominates the conversation.
But history offers perspective. Similar periods of pessimism marked the closing phases of the previous four-year bitcoin cycles: from 2014 to 2017, and again from 2018 to 2021. Viewed through that lens, the currency cycle that began in 2022 is not collapsing; it is maturing.
Focusing solely on price action obscures the deeper issue. The real risk is not bitcoin’s volatility. It is the financial system that bitcoin was created to question. Nowhere is that system’s failure more visible than in Pakistan. At its core, that failure manifests through inflation: a process widely misunderstood and routinely misdescribed. Inflation is often explained as prices going up.
That description is convenient and incomplete. Prices are not the cause of inflation; they are its effect. Inflation begins with the continuous expansion of the money supply. When currency is created year after year, the purchasing power of every unit declines. Savers lose quietly. Salaries lag. Living standards erode.
In Pakistan, the consequences are everywhere. Food, fuel, rent and education cost more each year: not because they have become intrinsically more valuable, but because the currency measuring them buys less. The result is a population trapped in short-term thinking: working harder, saving less and feeling perpetually 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 privatised. Losses are socialised. Asset bubbles form, crises follow and wealth concentrates further at the top.
No matter how hard most people work, the value of their earnings continues to erode unless they gain access to assets ahead of inflation 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 quiet 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 decentralised and returns agency to individuals. It functions as an equaliser in societies increasingly fractured by economic stress and resentment. Its properties are straightforward.
Bitcoin has a fixed supply of 21 million coins, permanently capped. No central authority can expand 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, that volatility has unfolded within a clear long-term upward trajectory, while its underlying fundamentals have remained unchanged. Over longer horizons, it has been the best-performing asset of the past decade. More revealing, however, is what happens when goods are priced in bitcoin rather than local currency.
Housing, technology and productive assets often become cheaper over time: not because value disappears, but because the money measuring them improves.
In 2012, a modest home in Islamabad priced at a few million rupees would have required thousands of bitcoins. Today, that 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 debasement is felt long before it is formally acknowledged, this distinction matters. Regulation does not validate bitcoin’s price, nor does it eliminate risk.
What it does is legitimise access. As compliant frameworks take shape and local rails develop, bitcoin is increasingly encountered not as a speculative instrument but as a savings technology, competing directly with a currency that has struggled to preserve purchasing power.
This matters most for a younger generation priced out of real estate, excluded from traditional asset classes and increasingly sceptical of institutions that promise stability but deliver erosion. Bitcoin does not require property deeds, brokerage accounts or political proximity. It requires only time, discipline and a long-term horizon.
Bitcoin offers no guarantees. It carries 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 feature of all.
Disclaimer: The viewpoints expressed in this piece are the writer’s own and don’t necessarily reflect Geo.tv’s editorial policy.
The writer is an Islamabad-based lawyer and Strategic Legal Counsel at HP | FKM. She can be reached at: [email protected]
Originally published in The News
