I am 35 years old. That means I have lived through loadshedding summers, textbook shortages, the 2005 earthquake, the 2010 floods, terror attacks that emptied our streets and the quiet heartbreak of watching friends board one-way flights to Dubai, Toronto or London because they believed the future was being built everywhere except here.
Like hundreds of millions of Pakistanis under 40, I have never known a Pakistan that was truly at peace with its own possibilities. We kept the country running on remittances, resilience and on the quiet heroism of mothers who taught their children to dream bigger than the circumstances they were born into.
But survival is no longer enough. It never was. Something fundamental has changed in 2025.
The world has entered a new age. An age measured not in five-year plans but in 18-month technology cycles. In this age, countries do not rise by managing crises a little better. They rise by inventing the future before others patent it.
Right now, that future is being written in artificial intelligence, in tokenised finance, in sovereign digital infrastructure. And for the first time in our history, Pakistan does not have to beg for a seat at somebody else’s table. We can build our own table, our own rules, our own playbook.
Pakistan is entering a moment that will define the next 20 years of our history. For decades, we have moved in circles of slow reform, crisis management and short-term fixes. Today, for the first time, we have a real chance to choose a different course.
I see this shift every day at PVARA. While many larger economies are paralysed by fear and indecision, we are quietly drafting one of the world’s most forward-leaning regulatory frameworks for digital assets. It is the foundation of a new kind of Pakistan, one that can attract long-term capital, power thousands of start-ups, and give our young people something their parents never had: a frontier to conquer at home, not just abroad.
We are 240 million people, two-thirds under 35, glued to smartphones, hungry for meaning. Our diaspora is already inside the engine room of the future. Pakistani engineers contribute to OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, leading crypto protocols, robotics labs and venture funds. Our freelance community is among the largest in the world. We have surplus electricity that can be turned into compute, the new oil of the twenty-first century.
And we have something no algorithm can replicate: the restless, defiant spirit of a nation that has been counted out too many times and is still standing.
But none of this is automatic.
History is unforgiving to countries that hesitate at inflexion points. I have studied the rise of Singapore, Estonia, the UAE, Rwanda. These are not big countries. They became big in ambition first, then in results.
Let me give you four stories the sceptics love to ignore:
Singapore, 1965: a tiny island kicked out of Malaysia, no resources, surrounded by hostility. Lee Kuan Yew looked at the map and said, “We have no choice but to leap”. Within one generation, it went from per-capita income lower than Pakistan’s to $82,000. They did it by betting everything on trade, talent, and technology before anyone else believed it was possible.
Estonia, 1991: newly independent, bankrupt, occupied for half a century. They declared they would “skip the industrial age entirely” and build a digital society. In 2001, they made internet access a human right. In 2014, they invented e-Residency. Today, more than 120,000 foreigners run EU companies from their laptops, paying taxes to Tallinn. Estonia’s digital economy is now larger than its physical one. Population: 1.3 million. Excuse count: zero.
Dubai, 2016: oil was dying. Instead of denial, they launched the Dubai Blockchain Strategy and created DMCC Crypto Centre. Eight years later, they host more licensed Web3 companies than London, New York and Singapore combined. Binance moved its global headquarters there. Real estate is bought in USDT. A city that could have faded into irrelevance became the new digital Switzerland of the East.
Rwanda, 2016. A landlocked African nation still healing from genocide decided to leapfrog roads entirely. They partnered with Zipline and built the world’s first national drone-delivery network. Today, drones fly blood, snake antivenom, and chemotherapy drugs to remote clinics in under 30 minutes. Maternal mortality from postpartum haemorrhage has plummeted. Rwanda now exports this technology to Ghana, Kenya, and soon the US.
These countries share one trait: they refused to wait for perfect conditions. They created the conditions themselves.
Pakistan now stands at the same kind of crossroads. So what could a bold, tech-first Pakistan look like in practice? Imagine this:
An AI-powered health network that picks up patterns of dengue, cholera and other outbreaks before they explode, and sends real-time alerts to doctors, local governments and citizens. A smart agriculture grid that gives every farmer personalised guidance drawn from satellites, soil data and seasonal pricing. A smallholder in Bahawalpur getting the same quality of insight that a large agribusiness gets in California.
Through tokenisation a teacher in Multan or a nurse in Quetta can invest from 10,000 rupees directly into Pakistan real estate, gold or stock market. Schools in Dera Ghazi Khan using Urdu-language AI tutors that explain physics and mathematics at the level of top private academies, closing a gap that once felt impossible to close.
AI agents translating all government documents, tax guidelines and citizen services into Urdu, Pashto, Sindhi and Balochi in seconds, ending the language barrier that has excluded millions.
Earlier generations gave us dams and motorways. Our generation’s national projects must look different. National-tier compute clusters that make Pakistan a serious player in AI. World-class AI research labs seeded by diaspora and local talent returning home to build. A sovereign digital identity stack that makes it easy to start a business, pay taxes and receive support without standing in a line. Tokenisation rails that turn our minerals, carbon credits, real estate, and even government debt into investable assets accessible from a smartphone.
We also need the courage to admit where we went wrong. Every global technology wave that Pakistan joined late came with a heavy price. We imported mobile phones instead of becoming part of the supply chain. We consumed cloud services instead of building sovereign compute. We are watching robotics and advanced manufacturing grow elsewhere while many of our own factories keep operating with tools from another century.
If we repeat that pattern with artificial intelligence, digital assets or modern digital infrastructure, the gap will not be measured in a few lost years but in lost generations. The countries that master these technologies will shape the global economy. Those that do not will spend their future renting capacity, renting platforms, renting influence.
What this really means is that Pakistan has run out of runway for incremental change. The old playbook is exhausted. The era of small pilots and cosmetic reforms is over. This is a time for clear decisions.
There is another reason this moment matters so much. Our youth is not just a statistic. It is our only real unfair advantage. Global investors, technology companies and research labs are looking for young, digital populations. They are asking a simple question: where will the next ten million developers, data scientists, product builders and AI-literate civil servants come from?
That answer can be Pakistan, but only if we treat our youth as a strategic asset, not a problem to be managed.
Youth without direction becomes frustration. Youth with a mission becomes a national force. So the choice before us is very clear: either we anchor our national strategy in deep technology, in AI, in digital assets, in data and compute and we accept the temporary discomfort that comes with reform. Or we condemn another generation to the heartbreak of watching the future happen on someone else’s screen.
Technology alone will not save us. Courage will. Courage to clean up regulation so that honest builders win. Courage to invest in compute and talent instead of short-term subsidies. Courage to tell our young people the truth: that nobody is coming to rescue us, and that this is our chance to rescue ourselves.
History bends in favour of countries that decide they will no longer live at the mercy of their past. Pakistan is standing at that decision point right now.
We can choose fear, or we can choose the future. Let us begin.
The writer is a minister of state and the chairman of the Pakistan Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority (PVARA). He tweets/posts @Bilalbinsaqib
