Asia's Two Regulatory Speeds: Hong Kong and Pakistan
Liang Hanjing, Head of Global Financial Services, Fintech and Sustainability at the Hong Kong Investment Promotion Agency, and Bilal Bin Saqib, Chairman of the Pakistan Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority (PVARA), shared a stage at Bitcoin Asia 2026 in Hong Kong. On a panel titled "The Future of Bitcoin and Special Economic Zones," they laid out two very different ideas on how fast to regulate digital assets.
Liang argued that consistency is what Hong Kong, as an international financial center, values most, saying that if rules keep changing, market participants could hardly engage. Hong Kong has chosen to lay out a roadmap and stick to it, rolling out new measures every six to twelve months so businesses can plan investments on three-to-five-year cycles. He also said that as Hong Kong embraces digital assets, it is aiming at putting $320 trillion of traditional financial assets on the blockchain.
Saqib emphasized speed. Pakistan's Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority went from the passage of relevant legislation to the introduction of rules in just six months, using only 8% of the government budget allocated to it. He said that at least in emerging economies, the existing institutional framework is still built on tracks from the 19th and 20th centuries, while technology is evolving at machine speed and internet speed.
He also said enforcement still needs adequate risk mitigation, but for a country like Pakistan, "the cost of inaction will be far greater than the cost of action."