Pakistan has called on United Nations member states to move beyond discussion and begin building the regulatory and institutional frameworks needed to govern digital assets and shape the next phase of global finance. Speaking virtually at a UN headquarters briefing, Minister of State and Pakistan Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority Chairman Bilal Bin Saqib told attendees that coordinated governance is essential if financial innovations such as tokenisation and distributed ledger technology are to drive economic inclusion rather than deepen existing divides. The session, titled Digital Assets and Blockchain for Sustainable Development, Advancing Digital Finance through Innovation, was organized by the Permanent Mission of Pakistan to the United Nations in coordination with UNDP, UNCTAD and the Office of the Secretary-General’s Envoy on Technology, drawing together member states, UN entities and private sector participants.
Bilal Bin Saqib framed the core issue facing the room not as whether these technologies would scale, since he argued that outcome was already certain, but as who would shape them and in whose interest. He placed ordinary people at the center of his remarks, pointing to the roughly 1.4 billion adults worldwide who remain entirely outside the formal financial system, alongside billions more who participate on unequal terms through costly remittances, slow settlement times and limited access to credit. On the remittance point specifically, he noted that the average cost of sending 200 dollars currently runs at more than double the 3 percent target set under Sustainable Development Goal 10.c, and that closing this gap could return billions of dollars annually to families who rely on cross border transfers.
Bin Saqib argued that the potential of digital finance extends well beyond payments alone. He described how digital identity systems paired with verifiable financial histories could help small businesses, farmers and women entrepreneurs demonstrate economic activity without depending exclusively on traditional collateral or paperwork, potentially opening access to credit for groups that have historically been excluded from formal lending. He also pointed to tokenisation as a mechanism for mobilising capital by breaking down large assets, such as infrastructure bonds or renewable energy projects, into smaller fractional units that a wider pool of investors could access, while suggesting that distributed ledger systems could improve transparency across public spending and supply chains more broadly. At the same time, he cautioned against treating technology as an automatic fix, highlighting risks that include volatility affecting retail investors, the use of digital assets for illicit finance, growing concentration of power among a small number of players, and a widening gap between countries with advanced regulatory capacity and those without.
On the question of how governments should respond, Bin Saqib argued that the choice facing every member state was not simply whether to regulate, but whether to actively govern the technology or be governed by its unchecked spread. He warned that frameworks introduced too late tend to fail both consumers and markets, while regulation driven mainly by fear risks pushing activity into less transparent and harder to monitor channels. Drawing on lessons from jurisdictions that have already begun regulating digital assets, he suggested that the more effective approach treats regulation as a tool for building markets rather than blocking them outright. He closed his remarks by encouraging member states to treat the UN briefing as the beginning of deeper cooperation rather than a standalone conversation, framing global coordination on digital asset governance as a shared undertaking rather than something any single country could accomplish on its own. Following his address, UN entities, member states and industry representatives continued discussions on the practical steps needed to responsibly implement blockchain, artificial intelligence and digital identity systems at scale.
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