ISLAMABAD, Pakistan – When U.S. President Donald Trump’s 2025 fiscal balance was released this week, one number stood out. His family’s crypto venture, World Liberty Financial (WLF), earned him more than $500 million in token sales alone last year, part of a broader crypto windfall worth hundreds of millions of dollars or more.
Pakistan was one of the first countries to sign a contract with the company.
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In January, Pakistan’s Ministry of Finance signed a memorandum of understanding with SC Financial Technologies, an affiliate of World Liberty Financial, to explore the use of the dollar-pegged USD1 stablecoin for cross-border payments.
Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and Field Marshal Asim Munir also attended, and executives from the company, including Trump adviser Steve Witkoff’s son Zac, were welcomed in Islamabad. Witkoff Jr. signed the agreement with Pakistan’s Finance Minister Mohammad Aurangzeb.
About six months later, Pakistani authorities confirmed that there are no pilot projects using USD1, no licenses have been issued, and no known transactions using the stablecoin.
But despite the gap between the ceremony and the memorandum’s official purpose, analysts say Pakistan has achieved something even more valuable than the $500 million Trump made from World Liberty Financial: giving Islamabad rare access to the Trump administration.
Questions about practicality
Stablecoins are digital currencies that are pegged to a fixed value (most often the US dollar) and are designed to move money over the internet without going through banks. USD1 is World Liberty Financial’s version.
The company earns interest on the reserves that back each coin, so widespread use of each dollar would generate income for the company’s owners, including the Trump family.
Pakistan is already one of the world’s largest crypto markets. The country ranked third in the world last year after India and the United States, according to Chainalysis’ Cryptocurrency Adoption Index, and much of its unofficial cryptocurrency activity is believed to be conducted through Tether’s USDT, the world’s largest stablecoin.
There is no evidence that USD1 has appeared in Pakistani transactions. More broadly, it remains unclear how much money moves through such channels.
A senior Pakistani bank official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said there were no reliable estimates and that the amount in circulation was estimated from official inflows rather than directly measured.
Informal channels are thought to account for around a tenth of remittances, with stablecoins accounting for an unquantified portion of that amount.
This uncertainty comes against a backdrop of record inflows of public funds. Pakistan received $38.3 billion in remittances last fiscal year, the highest amount on record and a 27% increase from the previous year, according to the country’s central bank, the State Bank of Pakistan.
Inflows reached a record $4.25 billion in May, the most recent month for which data is available. The central bank expects remittances to exceed $42 billion this year.
This raises broader questions about the rationale for the agreement itself.
“Given that Pakistan is receiving record remittances through banking channels, and in many cases the remittances are instantaneous, why would people use USDT (Tether stablecoin) in the first place?” Canada-based banking and finance expert Ibrahim Khalil told Al Jazeera. “Whatever the reason, (these) people are avoiding banking channels. If banking channels are involved, $1 USD won’t solve that problem.”
Khalil also pointed to practical constraints.
Pakistan’s central bank held $16.5 billion in foreign exchange reserves as of late June, enough to cover about two months’ worth of imports.
He said that unless Pakistan’s trading partners directly accept $1, the central bank would have to convert the tokens back to dollars before they can be used, potentially adding friction rather than removing them.
Regulations before deployment
Nevertheless, Pakistan moved quickly to establish a regulatory framework.
The Virtual Assets Act passed in March established the Pakistan Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority (PVARA), a permanent regulator with the power to license companies and impose jail terms of up to five years for operating without authorization.
In April, the State Bank authorized banks to open accounts for licensed cryptocurrency companies.
However, PVARA is still only accepting provisional applications and the full licensing rules have not yet been published. Two global exchanges, Binance and HTX, have been granted no-objection certificates and are registered, but are not yet permitted to operate.
The bank executive, who spoke on condition of anonymity, was cautious when discussing the World Liberty Financial Agreement. “The memorandum in question is about exploratory and technical dialogue and knowledge sharing, and there is no commitment to introduce a specific stablecoin,” he told Al Jazeera.
Any company that meets PVARA’s licensing requirements could eventually perform the same functions, he added. “The architecture is more important than the trading partner.”
On the timeline, he was straightforward. He said licensing, bank deployment, pilots and eventual expansion would realistically take many months.
diplomacy and access
If the remittance case remains uncertain, the diplomatic logic behind the agreement will become even harder to ignore.
The Global Free Finance delegation first arrived in Islamabad in April last year, just days after a deadly attack by armed militants in Pahalgam, Indian-administered Kashmir, sparked renewed tensions between India and Pakistan.
Pakistan nominated President Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize in June last year, citing his “outstanding political skills” as having helped calm the conflict with India in May.
President Trump also invited Munir to lunch at the White House in June 2025, marking the first time a U.S. president has hosted a Pakistani military commander who is not the head of state.
The January memorandum was announced just before the US-Israel war against Iran, during which Pakistan positioned itself as an intermediary between the US and Iranian governments.
Last month in Switzerland, U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance praised Munir for helping broker a peace framework between Washington and Tehran, calling him a “great statesman.”
PVARA Chairman Bilal Bin Saqib was appointed as an advisor to World Liberty Financial in April last year, but resigned from the position after joining the Pakistan government. In March 2026, Bin Saqib told Bloomberg that the push for cryptocurrencies had opened doors and rebuilt trust with Washington.
The White House said there was no conflict of interest.
Bin Saqib, PVARA and the Ministry of Finance did not respond to requests for comment.
Whether this deal ultimately benefits Pakistani workers may ultimately matter less than what it has already brought to the country.
“The memorandum was just an access tool. There was no real policy basis,” said Khurram Hussain, a Karachi-based economist and commentator. “Access was a calculation, and it worked out beautifully. The tangible benefit for Islamabad was gaining good access to President Trump’s White House, which was then added to by diplomacy in the context of the Iran war.”
Khalil agreed.
“My conclusion is that this whole exercise was a pay-for-access exercise,” he said.
