On March 14, 2025, the Government of Pakistan launched the Pakistan Crypto Council (PCC), a body under the Ministry of Finance tasked with regulating and promoting the country’s digital asset infrastructure, reported Abhinandan Mishra of Sunday Guardian.

Bilal Bin Saqib, a UK-based entrepreneur with limited formal financial regulation experience, was appointed as the PCC’s founding CEO and soon after became Special Assistant to the Prime Minister on Blockchain and Crypto, with Minister of State status.

Within weeks, the PCC signed a Letter of Intent with World Liberty Financial (WLF), a Delaware-based crypto firm majority-controlled by the Trump family, between April 26 and 27, 2025. The agreement outlined collaboration on blockchain infrastructure, use of WLF’s USD1 stablecoin in Pakistan’s financial system, tokenization of national assets, and the creation of a national DeFi sandbox—a controlled environment for testing decentralized finance projects under government oversight.

At the time of signing, the PCC lacked parliamentary backing and regulatory authority, and cryptocurrency remained illegal under State Bank of Pakistan (SBP) directives. Despite this, WLF’s delegation, including co-founders Zachary Folkman and Zachary Witkoff, met with Pakistan’s top officials: Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, Finance Minister Muhammad Aurangzeb, SBP Governor Jameel Ahmad, SECP Chairman Akif Saeed, and notably, Chief of Army Staff General Asim Munir. Munir’s involvement, despite the Army’s lack of jurisdiction over financial technology, signaled that the deal was driven by strategic, not merely economic, considerations.

Sources revealed that Gulf-based intermediaries with longstanding ties to both the Pakistani military and Trump-linked financial networks facilitated the meeting. WLF is not a typical fintech start-up; as of early 2025, the Trump family directly owned over 22.5 billion WLFI tokens, the governance token of the WLF ecosystem. Approximately 75% of revenues from token sales were allocated to Trump-controlled entities, and Donald Trump reported over $57 million in personal income from WLF-related activities in 2024.

Crucially, the WLF-PCC deal was signed just days after a major terror attack in Pahalgam, Jammu and Kashmir, on April 22, 2025, which killed 26 civilians and was attributed to Lashkar-e-Taiba, a group linked to the Pakistani military. The timing suggests that the agreement served as a geopolitical hedge by General Munir, aiming to secure goodwill with Donald Trump and his financial network in anticipation of international backlash following the attack.

WLF’s financial stakes in Pakistan are significant. With Pakistan’s remittance corridors handling over $30 billion annually, even modest adoption of WLF’s USD1 stablecoin could yield $75–150 million annually in transaction fees and reserve float for the Trump family, with potential for much more if adoption scales. Pakistan’s allocation of 2,000 MW of surplus electricity for crypto mining further enhances WLF’s commercial viability, offering infrastructure that would be cost-prohibitive in the U.S. or Europe. Moreover, state-backed integration of $WLFI tokens could artificially inflate their value, directly benefiting Trump-owned assets.

Beyond financial gains, the deal enables the collection of valuable data from KYC processes, behavioural analytics, and blockchain usage, which could be monetized or used for geopolitical leverage.

The core of the WLF–PCC partnership lies in the convergence of three risk vectors:

A fragile, military-dominated Pakistani state seeking to hedge against diplomatic fallout from cross-border terrorism.
A private U.S. entity with direct access to a sitting U.S. President.
A regulatory vacuum allowing non-transparent asset flows.

While presented as a fintech leap for Pakistan, the deal functions as a geopolitical backchannel that monetizes state vulnerability and obscures the line between public policy and private gain. With Donald Trump’s return to the U.S. presidency in January 2025, this arrangement transformed from a speculative hedge to an operational immunity mechanism.

Any financial or regulatory action against Pakistan that could undermine WLF—by agencies such as OFAC, FinCEN, FATF, or the IMF—now faces a conflict of interest at the highest level of the U.S. government, given the Trump family’s financial exposure.

Consequently, agencies under the U.S. Executive Branch are politically constrained from sanctioning or penalizing Pakistan, granting the country a strategic buffer. Responses to terror escalation, terror financing, or crypto abuse could be delayed, softened, or nullified. The IMF, with the U.S. as its largest shareholder, may ease loan conditions to protect what could be framed as “private American innovation,” while the FATF may soften technical assessments under diplomatic pressure, especially if Pakistan claims progress on blockchain transparency.

This dynamic was tested almost immediately. Following the Pahalgam massacre, India launched a diplomatic offensive, urging punitive measures through the IMF and FATF. Nonetheless, the IMF released a $1.2 billion tranche to Pakistan in early May, citing economic reforms and digital infrastructure progress, with no mention of the attack. FATF similarly declined to take adverse action despite Indian pressure and intelligence on continued terror financing. Senior IMF officials privately acknowledged that Washington’s delegation did not support withholding funds, despite the severity of the incident.

Munir’s strategic achievement was not merely securing a crypto partnership but leveraging it as a geopolitical firewall. By financially entangling Pakistan with the Trump family’s interests, he created an “insurance policy” that shields Pakistan from hardline international responses, especially from the U.S., and provides unprecedented immunity for the state’s actions in the global arena.

Based ON SG Report