Pakistan has urged for enhanced global collaboration to establish regulatory and institutional frameworks for digital assets, cautioning that nations must either take charge of the future of finance or risk being dictated by it.
Bilal Bin Saqib, Minister of State and Chairman of the Pakistan Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority (PVARA), expressed these views while delivering a keynote address virtually at the United Nations Headquarters during a session titled “Digital Assets and Blockchain for Sustainable Development: Advancing Digital Finance through Innovation.”
This session was organized by the Permanent Mission of Pakistan to the United Nations in partnership with UNDP, UNCTAD, and the Office of the Secretary-General’s Envoy on Technology (ODET), uniting member states, UN agencies, and private-sector participants.
Bin Saqib emphasized that digital assets, tokenization, and distributed ledger technologies present emerging economies with a chance to rethink their financial infrastructure in terms of inclusion, efficiency, and accessibility.
“The issue at hand is not whether these technologies will expand. They will. The real question is: who will influence their development, and for whose benefit?” he stated.
He underscored the extent of global financial exclusion, pointing out that approximately 1.4 billion adults are still outside the formal financial system, while billions more encounter high remittance costs, sluggish settlement processes, and restricted access to credit.
The minister noted that the average expense of transferring USD200 internationally exceeds twice the 3 percent target established under Sustainable Development Goal 10.c, arguing that bridging this gap could return billions of dollars to families each year.
He asserted that the promise of digital finance goes beyond mere payments and remittances.
Digital identity and verifiable financial histories, he said, could enable small businesses, farmers and women entrepreneurs to demonstrate economic activity without relying solely on conventional collateral or documentation. Similarly, tokenisation could help mobilise capital by fractionalising assets ranging from infrastructure bonds to renewable energy projects, while distributed ledger technology could enhance transparency in public expenditure and supply chains.
However, Bin Saqib cautioned that technology should not be viewed as an automatic solution to development challenges. He identified risks including retail market volatility, illicit finance, concentration of economic power and the growing regulatory divide between countries with advanced digital capabilities and those lacking institutional capacity. “The choice before every Member State is not regulate or don’t regulate. It is simpler, and starker, than that: to govern the future, or be governed by it,” he said.
The PVARA chairman stressed that regulation needed to evolve alongside technological innovation, warning that delayed regulation could expose consumers and markets to risks, while regulation driven primarily by fear could push digital activity into less transparent environments.
He said the emerging global experience suggested that regulation should be viewed as a means of building markets rather than blocking them.
“No nation rises alone, and no nation should be left to rise alone,” Bin Saqib said, urging member states to turn the UN briefing into the beginning of deeper international cooperation.