PVARA Chairman Bilal Bin Saqib meets PDA Chairman, Dr. Sohail Munir, to Discuss Institutional Collaboration

Building Strategic Partnerships for a Digitally Progressive Pakistan

Pakistan’s digital economy and its virtual assets sector are often treated as if they belong to different domains. While one concerns national infrastructure and governance, the other concerns regulation and financial innovation. However, they share the same goal: a resilient, innovation-driven digital Pakistan.

That was the premise behind a recent meeting at the Headquarters of the Pakistan Digital Authority (PDA), where Bilal Bin Saqib, Chairman of the Pakistan Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority (PVARA), met with Dr. Sohail Munir, Chairperson, PDA.

Dr. Munir walked Bin Saqib through PDA’s mandate under the Digital Nation Pakistan Act, 2025. Among other initiatives, PDA is developing the National Digital Masterplan and building the digital public infrastructure that will eventually underpin everything from digital identity to data exchange. It will, in effect, be the foundation layer on which sectors such as virtual assets will need to operate.

Virtual assets cannot be regulated in isolation from the digital infrastructure that identifies users, secures data, and moves information across institutions. And digital infrastructure is incomplete without accounting for the emerging asset classes and technologies reshaping how value moves through an economy. Treating these as two unrelated mandates risks building systems that were never designed to work together.

They discussed where digital governance and virtual assets regulation intersect, and where closer coordination can prevent the institutional silos that slow digital reform. PDA’s work building the country’s digital foundation offers a working model of what coordinated, cross-institutional design should look like, and its openness to this conversation reflects an institution that treats partnership as core strategy.

Digital transformation and financial innovation are not parallel tracks; they are converging fast, and the institutions responsible for each will need one another more, not less, in the years ahead.