Crypto in Pakistan is unregulated, not illegal

Number three to number six: Pakistan’s adoption is slipping

Muzamil opens by naming his own bias upfront: he has been vocal about disliking cryptocurrency for years, and just as vocal about recently changing his mind. To pressure-test that shift, he brings on two people from inside the industry rather than commentators outside it: Rohan Asif, Binance’s community manager, and Humza Khan, an operations specialist at the exchange.

The first numbers on the table aren’t flattering. Pakistan ranked third globally for crypto adoption in 2021. By 2022, it had slipped to sixth. Muzamil asks the obvious question: is Pakistan losing interest, or is everyone else catching up? The answer, from the guests, is the second one. Markets like Dubai and Bahrain built licensing frameworks and actively invited the industry to the table, while Pakistan’s frameworks stayed largely undefined. Entrepreneurs and capital started drifting toward the Middle East and Europe instead. The guests frame this less as a loss than a race Pakistan can still re-enter, but the direction of travel is clear: regulation, not enthusiasm, is now the scarce resource.

Unregulated, not illegal

Muzamil turns the conversation directly to Rohan Asif with a question a lot of Pakistanis quietly wonder about: is owning crypto even legal here? Rohan’s answer is precise, and it’s the sharpest claim in the whole conversation.

“Pakistan mein abhi jo landscape hai, uske mutabiq crypto is unregulated, not illegal,” he says, adding that the confusion exists because no law currently identifies specific harm severe enough to ban the asset class outright. New technologies get studied before they get legislated, he argues, and crypto is still in that earlier phase. He points to countries further along the spectrum: Dubai and Bahrain building licensing regimes, El Salvador adopting Bitcoin as legal tender, India moving toward regulation. The takeaway he wants people to sit with is simple: the perception of illegality is doing more damage in Pakistan than any actual law.

Control of your assets: the value proposition beyond fintech

Muzamil pushes back on the pitch itself. If a Pakistani fintech app can already move money in seven seconds, what does crypto add beyond speed? The response leans on ownership rather than convenience. The value, one of the guests explains, isn’t just that transactions are fast, it’s that a user holds direct control of the asset itself, without an intermediary sitting between them and their money. That control, paired with a transparent public ledger, is framed as the real departure from traditional finance, where hidden fees and buried terms are the norm.

The guests connect this back to remittances and financial inclusion specifically, arguing that a transparent, fast, and secure rail matters most in exactly the kind of emerging market Pakistan is. They’re careful to note that none of this works at scale without progressive regulation. Without it, the industry stays capped, jobs and entrepreneurship stay capped with it, and the “democratization of value” they describe, as a contrast to Web 2’s concentration of information and control, remains theoretical.

Coins move value, tokens power networks

One of the clearer distinctions in the episode is between a coin and a token, and Humza Khan walks through it using Ethereum. “Ethereum ka jo token hai, it actually powers the transactions jo network mein hoti hain and network ke upar kaafi apps bane hote hain,” he says. People generally aren’t holding Ethereum purely to profit from price swings; the builders of the ecosystem use it to run the network itself. He extends the same logic to Polkadot, arguing that as an ecosystem’s use expands, the token’s function, and therefore its value, expands with it.

Muzamil pushes this into a comparison he’s been sitting with for a while: is buying a project’s coin closer to buying Amazon’s stock, or closer to buying whatever happens to be sitting in Amazon’s warehouse? Humza’s answer draws the line at utility. Some tokens are built with a defined function inside a network. Others, especially pure coins, still have their value being worked out in real time, closer to narrative and perception than to a claim on future profit.

How a coin gets listed, and how it gets delisted

Muzamil asks the practical question: can anyone just launch a coin and get it listed on an exchange? Rohan Asif walks through Binance’s vetting process, use case, team, market cap, and how many active wallet addresses actually trade the asset. He doesn’t dodge the obvious follow-up about meme coins either: “I think humne ek Pepe coin list kiya tha recently, so jisko bhi ek shitcoin ke taur par hota hai,” he says, naming the listing directly rather than pretending the category doesn’t exist on the platform.

Where Rohan puts the real weight is on the user, not the listing criteria. New users show up wanting a trading signal that will double their money fast, and when it doesn’t work out, they’re the ones left holding the loss. “A new user doesn’t know how to buy crypto safely,” he explains, describing how centralized exchanges try to act as custodians guiding a person’s entire experience, in contrast to the fully decentralized model Bitcoin was originally built on. Binance’s answer to fraud risk, in his framing, isn’t fewer coins on the platform. It’s in-app education at every step of a transaction, paired with an explicit refusal to give financial advice.

Proof of reserves, zk-SNARKs, and the FIA

The conversation’s most concrete section covers what actually backs trust in a centralized exchange. Muzamil raises the obvious fear directly: after a major exchange collapse elsewhere in the industry, how does anyone know the numbers on their screen correspond to real assets, and what stops a hacker from taking everything overnight?

Humza Khan’s answer runs through several layers. First, verifiability: a wallet address and a block explorer let anyone independently confirm a transaction landed where it was supposed to. Second, immutability: the blockchain itself can’t be altered, even if individual platforms can fail. Third, and this is where the episode gets most specific, proof of reserves: “We made our own assets and liquidity public, so anyone can go and check what reserves Binance actually holds.” He also brings up zk-SNARKs, a form of zero-knowledge proof used to validate transactions, as an emerging piece of that transparency stack, while cautioning that the technology is still developing.

On law enforcement, Humza is direct: “Yeah, 100%. I think as long as the request is valid,” describing active monitoring by anti-money-laundering agencies and a documented history of cooperating with Pakistan’s FIA. New users, he says, are screened against World-Check before onboarding, a database used to flag politically exposed persons and criminal history. It’s a notably unglamorous answer for an industry often sold on the promise of no intermediaries at all, and Humza says as much: full decentralization is still a dream even for people inside the company, given how little financial education exists at a foundational level.

CBDCs and the rush toward digital currency

Muzamil connects crypto’s rise to a parallel trend: central banks racing to build their own digital currencies. Humza Khan supplies the numbers. “CBDCs 2021 mein were hot topic. Nearly 80% of the jurisdictions unhone opt in kiya ke bhai hum karenge,” he says, adding that roughly 60% have since made a public commitment. Nigeria’s eNaira gets singled out as the sharpest example: launched in September 2021, it drew nearly 600,000 accounts within three months, largely by reaching people who never had a bank account to begin with.

Humza frames the broader CBDC wave as validation rather than competition, evidence that the idea of digital-native currency has moved from a crypto talking point to a policy conversation happening inside governments themselves. He’s careful to separate CBDCs from decentralized crypto assets: a CBDC is still centralized, issued and controlled by a state, which is exactly why regulators find it easier to stomach than something like Bitcoin.

Interest, gold, and reserve currencies: Muzamil’s reframe

The most personal section of the conversation belongs to Muzamil, not the guests. He walks through how his own view of crypto shifted once he started thinking about interest through an Islamic finance lens. Interest, he argues, exists mainly to offset inflation in a fiat system where money loses value simply by sitting still, whereas a finite asset like gold, or by extension Bitcoin, holds its value because nothing is diluting it. “Bitcoin itself remains the same,” he says, framing price swings against the dollar as a statement about the dollar, not about Bitcoin.

He extends this into a broader argument about excess: Islam’s discomfort with debt-driven consumption, he suggests, sits oddly next to a fiat system that’s structurally built to encourage spending over saving. From there he widens the lens further, tying dedollarization pressure and the historical pattern of reserve currencies rising and falling, the pound giving way to the dollar, the dollar now facing its own challengers, to the idea that a currency with genuinely global buy-in could eventually reduce the need for any single dominant reserve currency at all. One of the guests responds cautiously, comparing a shared digital asset to a shared language like English: useful in theory, but a long way from happening while access, education, and social-engineering risk remain unevenly distributed.

Binance Academy and the dot-com parallel

Closing the interview, Muzamil asks Rohan Asif what an average person with zero exposure should actually do to get started. His answer is education first: “Ek free platform hai jahan se aap sab everything crypto ke baare mein seekh sakte hain,” he says of Binance Academy, describing Urdu-language material, offline events, and weekly webinars aimed specifically at the Pakistani market, alongside explicit warnings about fraud tactics like impersonation on Telegram.

Muzamil closes the episode with his own framing rather than a summary of the guests. He draws a direct line to the dot-com crash of 2001: an era where the internet was oversold, crashed, got dismissed as a scam by the same people who’d hyped it, and then quietly produced Google, Amazon, and Facebook in the years that followed. His bet is that crypto is somewhere in that same cycle now, past the hype, past the crash, and closer to the point where the real building starts. He repeats, more than once, that nothing said on the episode is financial advice. What he’s arguing for isn’t buying. It’s understanding, before the next decade decides the terms without you.