"Keynote Remarks by Mr. Bilal Bin Saqib, Minister of State and Chairman, PVARA On Digital Assets and Blockchain for Sustainable Development(September 11, 2026)*******Excellencies, Ambassador Asim Iftikhar Ahmad, Colleagues from UNDP, UNCTAD and ODET, Distinguished guestsI want to begin with a single transaction.Tonight, somewhere in Riyadh, a Pakistani worker will finish a long shift and send money home. Last fiscal year, men and women like him sent Pakistan a record 41.6 billion dollars.That is not a macroeconomic statistic. That is school fees. Hospital bills. Rent. The first capital for a small business.Now picture that worker multiplied across the developing world. The global average cost of sending 200 dollars home is still above six percent. In 2015, in this very building, we promised to bring it below three percent by 2030. We have less than four years left and we are still at more than double the target.And for 1.3 billion adults, there is no account to receive that money at all. Half of them live in just eight countries. Pakistan is one of them.For most of modern history, emerging economies have been told to wait. Wait for correspondent banks to find us profitable. Wait for branches to reach our villages. Wait for the frontier to be built somewhere else, tested somewhere else, and sold to us a decade later, at a premium.That model is ending.Value can now move the way information moves: instantly, globally, programmably, at a fraction of the cost. A young woman with a smartphone in Quetta, Lagos or Dhaka can receive a remittance in seconds, hold a digital dollar, and one day own a small piece of a tokenized bond.The technology is no longer the bottleneck. Trust is. And trust is built by institutions. That is why Pakistan made a choice.Until very recently, digital assets in Pakistan lived in a grey zone, even as Chainalysis ranked us third in the world for grassroots crypto adoption. Millions of Pakistanis were already using these tools. Without protection. Without oversight. Largely offshore.We could have kept it in the shadows. We chose to build.In July 2025, we established the Pakistan Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority. In March this year, Parliament passed the Virtual Assets Act. Last month, our licensing regime went live, covering exchanges, custody, stable coin and tokenized-asset issuance, with a regulatory sandbox for innovators. Our central bank has opened the door for banks to serve licensed providers. And five days ago, the deadline passed for every existing operator to come inside the regulatory perimeter, or shut down.From primary legislation to live licensing in under six months.If there is one idea I would ask this room to carry out, it is this: regulation and innovation are not opposites. Clear rules are what turn a market into public infrastructure.So what does that infrastructure make possible? Three things.First, remittances that arrive in seconds instead of days, and cost cents instead of six percent, putting the SDG target back within reach.Second, capital. Tokenization lets a country like ours open its assets to global investors in small, liquid pieces, financing exporters, small businesses and green infrastructure that traditional markets have been too slow, or too expensive, to reach.Third, trust in public money. When a development dollar lives on a shared ledger, you can follow it to the last mile. The UN Pension Fund has already shown what blockchain-based digital identity can do for its retirees. Imagine that same traceability for aid, for subsidies, for climate finance.And the next frontier is already arriving. AI agents will soon transact on behalf of people and businesses. The rails that carry those payments are being designed right now. If emerging economies are not in the room while they are built, we will be renting them later.None of this is automatic. The same rails that carry a remittance can carry illicit finance. Unregulated markets have wiped out ordinary people's savings. Stable coins raise real questions of monetary sovereignty. We take all of that seriously, which is exactly why our law puts licensing, anti-money-laundering and sanctions compliance at its core.But here is the risk I worry about most. Not that this technology fails. That it succeeds, and the developing world is left out.The rules of the next financial system are being written right now, in a handful of capitals. If regulatory capacity stays concentrated there, the digital divide becomes a financial divide. And that one will be far harder to close.So let me make an offer.Pakistan is ready to share what we have built, our legislation, our licensing framework, our sandbox design, and, just as importantly, the mistakes we made along the way, with any Member State that wants it. Through UNDP's Government Blockchain Academy, through UNCTAD, through ODET, or directly, government to government. No developing country should have to start from a blank page.And I would ask the United Nations to be the place where emerging economies write these rules together, not simply receive them.Let me close where I began: with people.Across the developing world, there is a generation of young people who have been told, in a hundred quiet ways, that the frontier was not built for them. That the future would reach their countries last.I was one of those young people. I am standing in this room because that turned out to be wrong.The frontier doesn't belong to whoever arrives first. It belongs to whoever builds. Let us build it, together, and for everyone.Thank you."