New PVARA derivatives rules make licensed venues warn and report on retail futures, but fix no leverage cap. No offshore venue owes Pakistanis this yet.
PVARA cut Schedule-I capital minimums up to 70% from its June 2026 draft, but also dropped the only relief route for smaller applicants.
PVARA notified Pakistan's crypto licensing rules on 21 August 2026. Its own licensing page tells firms already operating to file an NOC by 5 September 2026.
Darul Uloom Karachi ruled cryptocurrency impermissible in June 2026. The ruling, its reasoning, the regulator's response, and where scholarly opinion stands — reported, not adjudicated.
The widely-quoted 15% crypto tax has no enacted basis we could find — and we could not obtain the Finance Act text to rule it out. What is documented, what is only proposed, and what you still owe.
SBP scrapped the scheme that made remittance transfers free, effective 1 July 2026. For the use case that drives most Pakistani crypto activity, the maths just changed.
The allocation is real and the duty exemptions are real. The subsidised tariff that made the numbers work is not — and the hash-rate thresholds circulating online cannot be verified.
The Virtual Assets Act defines asset-referenced tokens broadly enough to cover real estate — and PVARA has opened applications. What is missing is everything underneath.
PVARA has opened applications for Asset-Referenced Token issuance while full VASP licensing stays shut. The order it chose tells you what Pakistan is trying to build.
PVARA's Sandbox Guidelines 2026 require applicants to confirm their product is not designed for speculation — and put Shariah advisors into the evaluation criteria.
The ECC funded Pakistan's virtual asset regulator in September 2025. Ten months on, here is the verifiable record — what has shipped, and what has not.
No exchange is licensed in Pakistan. Binance and HTX hold No Objection Certificates; Bitget is reported to have entered the NOC pipeline, which is not the same thing. None of that is a licence. What that means for your money, and how PKR actually moves.
