Govt urges UN to regulate digital assets

Pakistan has called on United Nations (UN) member states to move collectively from discussing digital assets to building the regulatory frameworks needed to govern the next generation of global finance, Minister of State and Chairman of the Pakistan Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority (PVARA) Bilal Bin Saqib said. Delivering the keynote address virtually at the UN Headquarters during a session on "Digital Assets and Blockchain for Sustainable Development: Advancing Digital Finance through Innovation", Bin Saqib said digital assets, tokenisation and distributed ledger technologies present emerging economies with an opportunity to rethink financial infrastructure around inclusion, efficiency and access. The briefing was convened by the Permanent Mission of Pakistan to the UN with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) and the Office of the Secretary-General's Envoy on Technology (ODET). "The question before this room is not whether these technologies will scale. They will. The question is: who will shape them, and in whose interest?" he said. Bin Saqib placed ordinary people at the centre of the debate, pointing to the 1.4 billion adults globally who remain outside the formal financial system, alongside billions more who participate on unequal terms through expensive remittances and limited credit access. He also highlighted the continued cost of cross-border remittances, noting the average cost of sending $200 remains more than twice the 3% target under Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 10c. Closing that gap, he said, would return billions of dollars annually directly to families. The minister argued the development potential of digital finance extends well beyond payments. Digital identity and verifiable financial histories could help small businesses, farmers and women entrepreneurs demonstrate economic activity without traditional collateral or documentation. Tokenisation could create new ways to mobilise capital by fractionalising assets from infrastructure bonds to renewable energy projects, while distributed ledgers could strengthen transparency across public expenditure and supply chains. He cautioned against treating technology as an automatic solution, pointing to risks from retail volatility and illicit finance to concentration of power and a widening divide between countries with sophisticated regulatory capabilities and those without them. "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 argued regulation must evolve alongside innovation, warning that late frameworks can fail consumers and markets, while regulation driven by fear can push technological activity into less transparent environments. The emerging lesson, he said, is that regulation should be treated as market-building rather than market-blocking.