CoinDesk 2025-05-28 22:34:28

Pakistan to Establish a Bitcoin Strategic Reserve, Allocate 2000 Megawatts of Energy for Crypto Mining

LAS VEGAS, Nevada — The government of Pakistan has plans to establish a strategic bitcoin BTC reserve and support bitcoin mining, the country’s Minister of State for Blockchain and Crypto Bilal Bin Saqib announced at Bitcoin 2025 in Las Vegas on Wednesday. Bin Saqib said that Pakistan’s plans for a strategic bitcoin reserve were inspired by U.S. President Donald Trump's administration’s own nascent plan for a strategic bitcoin reserve in the U.S., which will — at least at first — be filled with the U.S. government’s holdings from criminal and civil forfeitures, estimated to sit at around 200,000 bitcoins. He also said that the government of Pakistan was following the U.S.’s push for stablecoin legislation, the GENIUS Act, “very carefully.” Like the bitcoins earmarked for the U.S. strategic reserve, Bin Saquib said that the Pakistani government would not sell its bitcoins. “This wallet, the national bitcoin wallet, is not for speculation or hype. We will be holding these bitcoins and we will never, ever sell them,” Bin Saqib said. In addition to setting up a strategic reserve, Bin Saqiib announced that the government of Pakistan has earmarked 2,000 megawatts of electricity for bitcoin mining and AI data centers.“We want to welcome all miners to come to Pakistan, all the infrastructure players to come to Pakistan and build with us,” Bin Saqib said. Bin Saqib said that the establishment of a bitcoin strategic reserve in Pakistan would be “just the beginning” of the country’s embrace of the crypto industry. “We have over 100 million unbanked people. They lack tools for saving, for investment, and we want to change that. We want them to break their economic classes. And I really believe that crypto and blockchain can help us take that quantum leap,” Bin Saqib said. “We want to tokenize our illiquid assets. We want to do digital IDs … So Pakistan is looking for allies. Pakistan is looking for access, because Pakistan wants to build.”