Waqar Zaka, a former TV host with more than a million followers on Youtube, has been lobbying officials for years to not only legalise the industry, but have the government invest in it. The FIA did not respond to Reuters' request for comment. On one occasion, he said, the FIA seized a cryptocurrency mining farm he had set up in Shangla, in Pakistan's northern Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province, which ran on its own hydroelectric power. Institutions have at times treated those involved in the trade of cryptocurrency with suspicion, worried about possible associations with money laundering.Īhmed said he has been arrested by the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) and charged with money laundering and electronic fraud twice, though the charges have not held up in court. These moves can't come soon enough for cryptocurrency advocates.
In February, one of the country's leading universities, the Lahore University of Management Sciences, received a grant worth $4.1 million to study the technology from Stacks, a blockchain network that connects Bitcoin to apps and smart contracts. Baqir declined to comment to Reuters on the topic. "We hope to be able to make some announcement on that in the coming months," he told CNN. The relevant bodies in the government who need to get things done are supporting it, and the promising thing is nobody wants to stand in the way of technical innovation."Īnd the head of the country's central bank, Reza Baqir, said in April the authority was looking into another digital asset, a central bank digital currency, and its potential for bringing transactions happening off the books into a regulatory framework. "But the good thing is someone set up this committee. "Half the members had no clue what it was and didn't even want to understand it," said committee member Ali Farid Khwaja, a partner at Oxford Frontier Capital and chairman of KASB Securities, a stock brokerage in Karachi. In response, the federal government has set up a committee to study cryptocurrency regulation, which includes observers from the FATF, federal ministers, and heads of the country's intelligence agencies. Pakistan is on the FATF's grey list of countries it monitors for failing to check terror financing and money laundering. While cryptocurrency is not illegal in Pakistan, the global money laundering watchdog, the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), has called on the government to better regulate the industry. Pakistan has seen a boom in trading and mining cryptocurrency, with interest proliferating in thousands of views of related videos on social media and transactions on online exchanges.
0 kommentar(er)
