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Pakistan's Bitcoin reserve was announced with real fanfare in May 2025: a government-led Strategic Bitcoin Reserve, seeded with digital assets already in state custody, plus 2,000 megawatts of electricity set aside for Bitcoin mining and AI data centres. Eighteen months later, in November 2026, the announcement is still the most solid part of the story. The reserve has no published wallet address, no disclosed size, and no confirmed purchases. The mining plan has no agreed electricity price. And the International Monetary Fund, whose programme Pakistan depends on, has refused to approve the cheap power the plan needs.
None of that means the idea is dead. It means the gap between announcing a reserve and owning one is where the whole story lives. This article explains what was actually announced, what has been built since, why the IMF and Pakistan's own Finance Secretary are standing in the way, and what would have to change for the plan to become real.
What the Pakistan Bitcoin reserve announcement actually said
On 28 May 2025, Bilal Bin Saqib — chief executive of the Pakistan Crypto Council and Special Assistant to the Prime Minister on Crypto and Blockchain, with the status of a minister of state — took the stage at the Bitcoin 2025 conference in Las Vegas and made the announcement. "Today is a very historic day," he said. "Today, I announce the Pakistani government is setting up its own government-led Bitcoin Strategic Reserve." The reserve, he said, would hold digital assets already in state custody — not for sale or speculation, but as a sovereign reserve signalling long-term belief in decentralised finance.
Two details mattered. First, the reserve would be seeded from assets the state already held, not bought on the open market. Second, the government would hold them and "never sell them" — a phrase Saqib repeated in interviews afterwards. The model was openly borrowed from the United States, where the Trump administration had set up its own strategic reserve filled, at least at first, with roughly 200,000 bitcoins seized through criminal and civil forfeitures.
The second half of the announcement was the energy side. In a first phase, 2,000 megawatts of surplus electricity would be allocated to Bitcoin mining and AI data centres. "We want to welcome all miners to come to Pakistan, all the infrastructure players to come to Pakistan and build with us," Saqib said. The Pakistan Crypto Council itself had only been established in March 2025, so the reserve and the mining allocation arrived within ten weeks of the council's creation — fast by the standards of any government, and that speed became part of the pitch.
What is actually in the reserve — and what is not
Here is the honest position as of November 2026: Pakistan has announced a Bitcoin reserve, but it has not shown one. No wallet address has been published. No figure for the reserve's size has been disclosed. No open-market purchases of Bitcoin by the government have been confirmed. An independent tracker that follows sovereign Bitcoin holdings classifies Pakistan's reserve as "None (Proposed)" — an announcement without a balance sheet — and notes that no verified sovereign Bitcoin holdings are on record as of August 2026.
That does not mean nothing happened. In February 2026, Saqib reported that the first governance milestone had been reached: state-held digital assets were being moved into formal custody arrangements designed for transparency and accountability. Custody is the unglamorous plumbing of a reserve — who holds the keys, who can move the coins, who audits the balance — and getting it right matters more than the press release. But custody arrangements are not the same as a published reserve, and eight months after that milestone, the public still cannot see what Pakistan holds.
Speaking at a Bitcoin Asia panel in Hong Kong in October 2026, Saqib framed the reserve as a project for "future generations, not for trading", and said the goal was to signal that Pakistan was open for business. He pointed to the country's scale — around 240 million people, roughly two-thirds of them under 30 — and said the regulatory framework had been built in six months at a fraction of the usual cost. The message was consistent: this is a long-term positioning play, not a trade. The problem with that framing is that a reserve nobody can verify is, for now, a promise rather than an asset.
The 2,000 MW mining plan, and the maths problem
The mining plan has a clearer logic than the reserve, and a harder problem. Pakistan's power system has a genuine surplus at certain times of year — the government has put it at around 7,000 megawatts — and surplus electricity that cannot be sold is wasted money. Bitcoin mining turns spare power into a saleable product. The same logic applies to AI data centres, which is why the 2,000 MW allocation covers both. On paper, it is one of the more sensible ideas in Pakistani energy policy: monetise what you already generate.
The problem is price. Mining only works if the electricity is cheap enough, and the numbers the government discussed were far below what power actually costs to produce. Reports in May 2025 put the planned mining tariff at up to Rs 24 per unit. An earlier proposal, from November 2024, had offered energy-intensive users — including data centres and crypto miners — power at Rs 22 to Rs 23 per unit. The IMF rejected that proposal, saying it resembled sector-specific tax holidays.
Then winter arrived and made the arithmetic worse. Producing an extra unit of electricity this winter costs far more than the price the mining plan envisaged — analysis published in October 2026 put the marginal cost at around Rs 45 a unit, roughly double the proposed mining tariff. Part of the reason is fuel: QatarEnergy's force majeure on liquefied natural gas deliveries to Pakistan, caused by the disruption around the Strait of Hormuz, was extended to 6 November 2026. Every unit sold to a miner at Rs 24 while it costs Rs 45 to generate is a unit the rest of the system pays for. That is the subsidy the IMF will not approve, and it is the reason the 2,000 MW allocation is still, seventeen months after the announcement, an allocation on paper rather than a row of humming machines.
The IMF said no to cheap power
The IMF's objection is about the power market, not about Bitcoin. The Fund does not recognise cryptocurrency as a reserve asset, and its programme with Pakistan — a 37-month Extended Fund Facility whose third review was completed in May 2026, with targets running through June 2027 — is built around fixing the power sector's circular debt, not adding new subsidised consumers to it.
When Pakistan went through its programme review in late September 2026, it was unable to secure approval for the subsidised power the mining plan depends on. Pakistani media reported on 21 September that the government had failed to get the Fund's approval for Bitcoin mining power, and Cointelegraph reported the plan was in limbo after the IMF rejected the power subsidies. The Fund has not blocked Pakistan from mining Bitcoin in principle. It has blocked selling miners electricity below cost while the country is borrowing from the Fund to keep its own power system solvent. Until that question is resolved — either with a tariff miners can actually pay, or with power that genuinely costs less to produce — the mining build-out stays where it is.
There is a second, quieter tension. Holding Bitcoin on the sovereign balance sheet while under an IMF programme raises questions the Fund has not publicly answered, and Pakistan has not publicly resolved. Whether that tension has been formally addressed in programme talks is unconfirmed. For a country that returns to the IMF every few years, that is not a detail to wave away.
The legal contradiction at the centre
The strangest part of the story is that Pakistan's own government disagrees with itself about whether any of this is legal. The Finance Secretary, Imdadullah Bosal, told a National Assembly Standing Committee on record that no legal framework for a national Bitcoin reserve exists, and that cryptocurrency remains illegal under current Pakistani law. That is the finance ministry's position: the reserve cannot be recognised on the sovereign balance sheet until a regulator with proper statutory authority exists.
The other half of the government has spent 2026 building exactly that authority. The Virtual Assets Act, 2026 formally established the Pakistan Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority, or PVARA, as the country's digital-asset regulator, with Saqib as its chairman. PVARA notified its licensing regulations on 21 August 2026, opening a licensing portal for virtual asset service providers. In December 2025, before the Act, PVARA had already granted No Objection Certificates to Binance and HTX; Bitget has since received one too, and the Express Tribune reported in September 2026 that around 70 additional applications from international exchanges were under consideration.
An NOC, however, is not a licence, and PVARA's own chairman has said the certificates are not blanket approvals. As of October 2026, no exchange in Pakistan held a full PVARA licence, and no public register of licensees had been published. The State Bank moved first on the banking side: its circular of 14 April 2026 permits banks to open and maintain accounts for virtual asset service providers that PVARA has approved or that are seeking approval. And the clock is now ticking — under PVARA's rules, NOC holders must apply for a full licence within three months of the licensing regulations being notified, which points to around 21 November 2026. PVARA has not confirmed that date, and a missed date triggers a written notice and at least 30 business days to respond, not an automatic loss of the NOC. But the next few weeks are when the licensing regime stops being a framework and starts being a test.
For anyone following the reserve, the legal picture is therefore two truths at once. The law now exists, in the form of the Virtual Assets Act and PVARA's regulations. But the Finance Secretary's objection — that the reserve itself has no legal home yet — has not been answered in public. The reserve is being built on a regulatory foundation that is itself still being poured.
Why Pakistan wants this anyway
Given the obstacles, it is worth asking why the government is pushing so hard. Part of the answer is demographics and timing. Pakistan has one of the world's youngest large populations, a deep pool of freelance and IT talent, and a remittance economy that already moves billions of dollars a year through informal channels. Crypto, for a government looking for growth that does not depend on another IMF programme, looks like a way to turn that informal activity into formal, taxable, investable business.
Part of the answer is energy. If the surplus-power problem is real — and the government's own figures say it is — then mining and AI data centres are one of the few industries that can absorb large amounts of electricity quickly, in places where the grid already reaches. The same megawatts could, in theory, power the AI infrastructure Pakistan also wants to build. That is why the 2,000 MW allocation was always described as mining and AI data centres, not mining alone.
And part of the answer is signalling. Binance founder Changpeng Zhao, who advises the Pakistan Crypto Council, said in November that Pakistan was laying strong foundations to become a major crypto hub by 2030, citing the speed of policy action through 2025. Local crypto media reported that strategic discussions with Binance could unlock nearly $2 billion in investment, though neither Binance nor the government has confirmed that figure. Even the ambition itself has value: a country that announces a Bitcoin reserve gets meetings, headlines and investor attention that a country quietly studying the idea does not.
There is also an institutional argument for holding Bitcoin at all. J.P. Morgan Asset Management's 2027 long-term capital market assumptions — shared publicly by Saqib in October — put Bitcoin's expected compound return at 10.0% a year, against 55.0% annualised volatility. That is the professional case in one line: high expected return, extreme volatility, and almost no correlation with the assets a central bank normally holds. It is a case for a small allocation, carefully managed. It is not a case for betting the reserves.
What it means for ordinary Pakistanis
For most Pakistanis, the honest answer is: not much, yet. The reserve does not change the price of Bitcoin, which trades around $74,000 this week and is set by global markets, not by Islamabad. It does not make buying or selling crypto legal in the ordinary sense — crypto is still not legal tender, and the licensing regime covers exchanges and service providers, not individual users. And it does not mean mining is suddenly a good idea for a household: the 2,000 MW allocation is for industrial-scale operations, and home mining at residential electricity rates has never made financial sense in Pakistan.
What could change, and soon, is the market ordinary users actually touch. If PVARA starts granting full licences in the coming months, Pakistanis will for the first time have licensed exchanges with bank accounts, published rules and a regulator to complain to. That is a real improvement over the current position, where the biggest exchanges operate on NOCs and users have no Pakistani regulatory protection at all. It is also the moment when the scams that already target Pakistani crypto users — fake exchanges, guaranteed-return schemes, impersonation accounts — will have a licensed alternative to compete against.
Until then, the rules that have always applied still apply. An NOC is not a licence. A government announcement is not a guarantee. And no one — not the government, not an exchange, not a social-media account — can promise returns on Bitcoin. This article is an explainer, not financial advice: it describes what the government has announced and where the plan stands, and it does not recommend buying, selling or mining Bitcoin.
What to watch next
The plan now has three dates that will tell us whether it is moving or stalling. The first is around 21 November 2026, when the first wave of NOC holders — Binance and HTX among them — are expected to file full licence applications under PVARA's rules. If those applications land and PVARA starts deciding them within its 60-to-90-day windows, the licensing regime becomes real. If they do not, the whole framework drifts.
The second is the IMF. Pakistan is expected to raise the mining-power proposal again in talks with the Fund, and the answer will depend on whether the government can show power that is genuinely surplus and cheap — hydro in summer, for example — rather than power bought at a loss. Local crypto media also reported in October that Pakistan was in talks about powering mining with captured methane gas; that report is unconfirmed, but it points to the kind of solution the plan needs: energy that would otherwise be wasted, not energy the grid has to buy.
The third is disclosure. A reserve that nobody can see is a press release. The day Pakistan publishes a wallet address, a balance, or an audit of what it holds, the story changes from an announcement into an asset. Until that day, the fair summary of the Pakistan Bitcoin reserve is the one the evidence supports: announced in May 2025, legally half-built, commercially unproven, and still waiting on the two approvals that matter most — the IMF's, on power, and the law's, on the reserve itself.
Frequently asked questions
Is Bitcoin legal in Pakistan?
Bitcoin is not legal tender in Pakistan, and the Finance Secretary has said cryptocurrency remains illegal under current law. But the Virtual Assets Act, 2026 created PVARA to license crypto businesses, and the State Bank now lets banks serve approved providers. The position is changing, and the full picture is explained in our guide to whether Bitcoin is legal in Pakistan.
Does Pakistan actually own Bitcoin now?
Not that anyone can verify. The government says the reserve is seeded with digital assets already in state custody, but no wallet address or balance has been published, and no open-market purchases have been confirmed. Independent trackers classify the reserve as proposed, not held, as of August 2026.
What is the 2,000 MW mining plan?
It is a first-phase allocation of 2,000 megawatts of surplus electricity for Bitcoin mining and AI data centres, announced alongside the reserve in May 2025. The plan depends on selling power to miners at a low tariff — reportedly up to Rs 24 per unit — but the IMF has not approved subsidised power, and winter generation costs are far higher, so no mining build-out has been confirmed.
Why did the IMF block cheap power for Bitcoin mining?
The IMF's objection is about the power market, not Bitcoin. Pakistan's power sector already carries large circular debt, and the Fund will not approve selling electricity below its cost of production while the country is under an IMF programme. The Fund also does not recognise cryptocurrency as a reserve asset.
Can I mine Bitcoin in Pakistan?
There is no licensed retail mining framework for individuals, and home mining at residential electricity rates is not profitable. The 2,000 MW allocation is aimed at industrial-scale miners and data-centre operators, and even that depends on the power-price question being resolved. Anyone offering guaranteed mining returns to small investors should be treated as a scam until proven otherwise.
When will crypto exchanges be licensed in Pakistan?
PVARA's licensing regulations were notified on 21 August 2026. NOC holders such as Binance, HTX and Bitget are expected to file full licence applications around 21 November 2026, and PVARA then has 60 to 90 days to decide. As of October 2026, no exchange held a full licence. The wider market context — including Bitcoin's slide toward $74,000 this week — is covered in our explainer on Bitcoin's two-month low, and the US regulatory picture in what the US midterms mean for crypto rules.
Sources
Dawn (via Newswall summary) — Pakistan unveils government-led Strategic Bitcoin Reserve, 29 May 2025. TFTC — Pakistan Bitcoin Reserve: Seized Assets, Stranded Energy, and a Legal Gray Zone, 28 August 2026. TEI Energy — Pakistan's 2,000 MW for Bitcoin and AI Looks Different When Winter Power Costs Rs45 a Unit, 5 October 2026. The Bitcoin Beacon — The IMF Blocks Pakistan's Cheap Power for Bitcoin Mining, 4 October 2026. Crypto Briefing — Pakistan's crypto chief makes the case for a national Bitcoin reserve, 28 August 2026. Bitcoin Reserve Tracker — Pakistan Bitcoin Reserve Overview. CryptoPakistan — Is Binance Legal in Pakistan? What Its PVARA NOC Means. Coincub — PVARA Licensing in Pakistan: What the Rules Require. The Express Tribune — Regulated exchanges to boost freelancer inflows, 18 September 2026. Gate News — Pakistan to Establish a Bitcoin Strategic Reserve, 29 May 2025. BitRss — Pakistan lays groundwork to become a major crypto hub, says Binance founder Changpeng Zhao, 8 November 2026. Bilal Bin Saqib (Facebook) — J.P. Morgan Asset Management 2027 Long-Term Capital Market Assumptions, 20 October 2026. Sarmaaya — KSE 100, Gold, Silver & BTC Prices in Pakistan, 11 November 2026 (Bitcoin $73,937.57).
This article is an explainer, not financial advice. It describes public announcements and reported facts about Pakistan's Bitcoin reserve and mining plan; it does not recommend buying, selling or mining Bitcoin. For more, visit abdulrahimmughal.com.