Pakistan has quietly crossed an important threshold. After laying the legal foundation for a regulated digital assets ecosystem through the Pakistan Digital Nation Act and the Virtual Assets Regulatory Ordinance earlier this year, the Pakistan Digital Assets Regulatory Authority (PVARA) began accepting license applications for crypto exchanges on December 2.
This shift was highlighted at the highest levels of state on December 6, when Binance Global CEO Richard Teng met senior politicians in Islamabad, alongside Prime Minister Muhammad Shehbaz Sharif and COAS-CDF Marshal Syed Asim Munir.
This commitment did not reflect market curiosity, but institutional intent: a recognition that issues of money, payments and digital value are now placed alongside national economic and security priorities.
In practical terms, this means that eventually, purchasing bitcoin via regulated local payment channels will become easier, cleaner and more compliant.
This is a notable development, coming at a familiar time of fear. Bitcoin prices are falling again. The critics are loud. The headlines talk about exhaustion, excess and the end of the cycle. Money withdrawals are accelerating. Confidence wavers. Once again, fear dominates the conversation.
But history offers perspective. Similar periods of pessimism marked the final stages of the previous four-year Bitcoin cycles: from 2014 to 2017, and then again from 2018 to 2021. Seen in this light, the monetary cycle that began in 2022 is not collapsing; he matures.
Focusing only on price developments obscures the deeper problem. The real risk is not the volatility of Bitcoin. This is the financial system that Bitcoin was created for. Nowhere is the failure of this system more visible than in Pakistan. This failure manifests itself essentially through inflation: a process that is widely misunderstood and regularly poorly described. Inflation is often explained by a rise in 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. When money is created year after year, the purchasing power of each unit decreases. Savers are losing quietly. Wages are lagging behind. The standard of living is eroding.
In Pakistan, the consequences are everywhere. Food, fuel, rent and education cost more every year: not because they have become intrinsically more valuable, but because the currency that measures them allows us to buy less. The result is a population trapped in short-term thinking: working harder, saving less and feeling perpetually behind.
Above all, this erosion occurs without transparency or consent. A small group controls the monetary system. Everyone else must seek permission to use their own money from banks and intermediaries. Profits are privatized. Losses are socialized. Asset bubbles form, crises ensue, and wealth becomes more concentrated at the top.
Even if most people work hard, the value of their income continues to erode unless they access assets before 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 rather than effort. This is the quiet failure of money.
Which brings us to the alternative. Bitcoin enters this landscape not as an investment argument, but as a monetary alternative. It is decentralized and gives power back to individuals. It functions as an equalizer in societies increasingly fractured by economic stress and resentment. Its properties are simple.
Bitcoin has a fixed supply of 21 million coins, permanently capped. No central authority can extend it. No political emergency can dilute it. Its rules are enforced by code rather than discretion, and its security relies on energy and mathematics, not trust in institutions.
Although bitcoin is often considered volatile, this volatility has been on a clear long-term upward trajectory, while its underlying fundamentals have remained unchanged. Longer term, it is the best performing asset of the last decade. More telling, 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 the value disappears, but because the currency that measures them improves.
In 2012, a modest house in Islamabad valued at a few million rupees would have required thousands of bitcoins. Today, that same property can cost tens of millions of rupees, but only a single-digit amount in bitcoin. The house has not changed. The currency did it.
For Pakistan, a country where the currency not only underperforms but regularly collapses as a store of value, and where devaluation is felt long before it is officially recognized, this distinction is important. Regulation does not validate the price of Bitcoin nor does it eliminate risk.
What it does is legitimize access. As compliance frameworks take shape and local rails expand, bitcoin increasingly emerges not as a speculative instrument but as a savings technology, in direct competition with a currency that is struggling to preserve its purchasing power.
This is particularly important for a younger generation excluded from traditional asset classes and increasingly skeptical of institutions that promise stability but cause erosion. Bitcoin does not require ownership deeds, brokerage accounts, or political affiliation. It only takes time, discipline and a long-term horizon.
Bitcoin offers no guarantees. This carries a real risk. But it restores something that modern money has quietly removed: the choice to opt out of a system designed to dilute itself by default. In a world where money has quietly failed to fulfill its most basic functions, this choice might be the most powerful element of all.
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policies of PK Press Club.tv.
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
