DIGITAL ASSETS
Pakistan no longer needs proof that people will use digital finance. Chainalysis ranked the country third in its 2025 Global Crypto Adoption Index and the Pakistan Crypto Council estimated last year that the country has around 20 million crypto users. Digital channels carry more than nine in ten retail payments by volume inside the formal financial system.
The policy environment is also beginning to catch up with that demand, as Pakistan moves toward a more structured approach to digital assets and considers how regulatory frameworks and financial infrastructure can evolve alongside growing adoption.
Pakistani consumers already treat money as something that moves through apps and wallets.
High adoption exposes the cost of fragmentation
Crypto’s first decade focused on access. Exchanges opened markets to users who had never held a brokerage account and stablecoins gave people another way to move value across borders. Digital wallets lowered the threshold for participating in financial markets.
Access loses much of its economic value when every financial need still sits in a separate product. Someone can own crypto and still rely on different systems to receive income, send money abroad, preserve purchasing power or gain exposure to conventional investments.
Remittances make that cost concrete. Pakistani workers sent home a record $41.6 billion in FY2026. At that scale, every extra layer between sender and recipient has a price.
The point of digital assets was to shorten the distance between a user and an economic outcome and for emerging-market consumers, who often face higher friction in reaching global financial products or moving value internationally, fewer intermediaries can help widen the range of financial opportunities available to them.
Utility will separate durable assets from noise
Stablecoins already show what a digital asset can do once it has a recognizable financial function: they settle value across borders and in online markets. Asset-backed tokens extend the same infrastructure to investment access, putting conventional assets such as equities and commodities onto digital rails.
Useful markets still need liquidity, pricing, execution and sound product design. Tokenisation has the potential to reduce some of the structural barriers that once made certain assets expensive or hard to reach. But sustained demand depends on whether the resulting product solves a problem well enough to enter a user’s financial routine.
Where digital money is already routine, convergence has an easier path, because users have accepted the interface. Competition then moves to the range and quality of opportunities available behind it.
Financial categories are starting to collapse
Crypto participation grows alongside widespread digital-payment behaviour in Pakistan. Economic value will depend on products that turn widespread digital-finance use into practical access across investing, value transfer and global markets
Traditional finance built separate institutions around separate products, yet retail users increasingly approach finance through the outcome they want rather than the institution that historically delivered it. As tokenisation brings cash-like assets, investments and market exposure into the same digital environment, the old boundaries between banks, brokerages, foreign-exchange providers and crypto platforms become infrastructure choices behind a more unified interface.
Tokenised equities already put that convergence into practice, with platforms offering blockchain-based exposure to public stocks alongside crypto-native assets.
At MEXC, we see this convergence as part of a broader shift in how digital-asset platforms are evolving globally. Our expansion into tokenised equities reflects this direction, while our ‘Infinite Opportunities’ vision is built around a broader idea: giving users access to a wider range of market opportunities while making the underlying complexity increasingly seamless.
Compressing the financial stack
Because mobile banking, wallets and instant payments are already routine for a large share of Pakistani consumers, newer financial infrastructure can build around established behaviour rather than inherit decades of product fragmentation.
For emerging markets, the opportunity is much larger than digitising existing financial products. New infrastructure can widen the range of assets and services available through familiar interfaces, so users gain exposure to opportunities that previously required separate accounts, specialist providers or greater capital. The economic value comes from expanding what ordinary users can reach through the financial tools they already understand.
Crypto and tokenised finance can extend Pakistan’s established digital-finance habits into broader economic activity by improving access to global assets, making value transfer more efficient and concentrating more financial services within fewer interfaces.
The strongest platforms will hide the complexity because users care about reaching the asset or service they need at a reasonable cost and with reliable execution. Which rail moves the payment or represents the asset belongs behind the screen.
From crypto adoption to financial access
Crypto participation grows alongside widespread digital-payment behaviour in Pakistan, giving digital finance a much deeper base than raw adoption statistics alone suggest. Economic value will depend on products that turn widespread digital-finance use into practical access across investing, value transfer and global markets.
Scale alone says little about economic importance. That will come from how deeply digital assets integrate with the financial activities people already perform.
The next phase of digital assets will not be defined simply by how many more people enter crypto. It will be defined by how effectively the industry can turn digital adoption into meaningful financial access.
For emerging markets, the prize extends well past another wave of crypto users. It is a financial layer that gives ordinary people a more direct connection to the markets and movement of value that matters to them.
The writer is the CEO of MEXC.