Minister of State and Chairman Pakistan Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority (PVARA) Bilal Bin Saqib, addressed the Point Zero Forum 2026 in Zurich, one of the world's most consequential gatherings of central bankers, regulators and financial leaders. While addressing the delegates he told that the rules governing money are being rewritten and Pakistan will help write them.
"Money has become software, and software does not respect borders," he told the Forum. "We are used to thinking of money as something a state simply has. A flag, a border, a currency. That era is ending."
It was a striking message to deliver to a room of the people who have governed money for a generation. Bin Saqib delivered it not as a petitioner from an emerging economy, but as the representative of one of the largest digital-asset markets on earth.
Speaking on the Forum panel "Unchaining Tokenized Money: Stablecoins, CBDCs, and the Race for Scale," moderated by Central Banking Publications, Bin Saqib appeared alongside Dr. Mampho Modise, Deputy Governor of the South African Reserve Bank. The session examined where tokenised money is already being adopted, what is holding it back from scale, and how regulators, banks, and technology providers can build interoperability across CBDCs, stablecoins, and tokenised systems.
His argument was direct. For countries where millions are already using digital assets, the choice is no longer whether to permit them. It is whether to govern the infrastructure or surrender it to others.
"Pakistan is approaching digital assets with a Pakistan-first strategy," he said. "Our position is that emerging economies should help shape the rules of tokenised finance, not simply inherit infrastructure built elsewhere."
"The countries that will do well are the ones willing to say something simple out loud: this is already happening, our people are already here," he added. "Our job is not to forbid the future but to govern it well."
Beyond the main stage, Bin Saqib was seated in a series of senior, invitation-only roundtables that placed Pakistan in direct conversation with central bankers and financial leaders from Singapore, Japan, the Philippines, the Gulf, and Europe, alongside the world's largest banks and digital-asset institutions. The question running through them was the one now facing every emerging economy: how to capture the efficiency of dollar-denominated tokenised money without surrendering monetary sovereignty, control of payment rails, or visibility over a nation's own financial flows.
That Pakistan was in the room at all reflects how far and how fast it has moved. The country now ranks third in the world for grassroots crypto adoption on the 2025 Chainalysis Global Crypto Adoption Index, behind only India and the United States, driven by a young, mobile-first population, one of the world's largest freelancer economies, more than 38 billion dollars[d][e] in annual remittances, and a public turning to stablecoins as a hedge against inflation. Pakistan did not adopt digital assets because of regulation. It adopted them first, and is now building the regulation to match.
The Point Zero Forum, now in its fifth edition, is the annual policy-technology gathering co-organised by the Global Finance and Technology Network and Switzerland's State Secretariat for International Finance, in cooperation with the BIS Innovation Hub, the Monetary Authority of Singapore, the Swiss National Bank, and FINMA. The 2026 edition, themed "A financial system rewired: trust, compliance and protocols in a shifting world," ran from 23 to 25 June at the Kongresshaus Zürich and convened more than 2,000 central bankers, regulators, policymakers, and industry leaders.
PVARA is the federal authority responsible for licensing and supervising virtual-asset service providers in Pakistan.
