Finance ministry wants cabinet approval before it asks for bids to tokenise Eurobond debt
Finance Minister Muhammad Aurangzeb told a banking dialogue in Lahore that the proposal is still under review and no request for proposals has been issued. The sequence is new detail on an idea first aired in September.
Pakistan's finance ministry expects cabinet approval before it issues a request for proposals to tokenise some of the country's existing Eurobond debt. Finance Minister Muhammad Aurangzeb said so on 2 November at a Dialogue on Digital Assets and the Future of Banking in Lahore, organised by the Pakistan Banks Association with LUMS's Centre for Digital Asset Research. The proposal is not final, and the request for proposals has not begun.
The idea is not new. Aurangzeb said on 4 September that the government was exploring tokenising some existing Eurobond debt, the day after the ministry announced a record $3 billion international bond. In May the ministry had held talks with the Pakistan Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority (PVARA) on a model in which sovereign bonds would be issued on a regulated blockchain platform and later connected to international clearing systems, and in January it had said it planned to tokenise up to $2 billion of domestic government debt in an initial phase.
The September issue gives a sense of scale. It had two tranches: $1.75 billion at a 7.50 percent coupon over 5.5 years and $1.25 billion at 7.90 percent over 10 years, with orders of about $6 billion. Our working: $131.25 million plus $98.75 million is $230 million a year in coupons, a blended rate of about 7.67 percent. No amount of Eurobonds to be tokenised and no timeline has been given.
The rules around it
Pakistan now has a statutory framework for virtual assets under the Virtual Assets Act 2026, with PVARA licensing and supervising service providers. The State Bank has set a conditional route for banks to serve PVARA licensed businesses, subject to due diligence and segregation of client funds, but banks remain barred from investing in, trading or holding virtual assets with their own money or customer deposits. Aurangzeb asked banks to help develop practical proposals and said innovation needs oversight, safeguards and cybersecurity.
State Bank Deputy Governor Saleem Ullah named blockchain enabled remittances and Roshan Digital Accounts as candidates for the central bank's sandbox. Securities and Exchange Commission of Pakistan Commissioner Imtiaz Haider said the test for tokenisation is which assets should be tokenised to deliver meaningful economic value. Zafar Masud, chairman of the Pakistan Banks Association, put the banks' position this way.
“Pakistan's banks are not asking to be protected from this change.”
Our reading
Tokenising an existing bond changes how ownership is recorded and moved, not what the government owes: the coupon, the maturity and the repayment promise stay as written. Existing Eurobonds sit in international clearing systems under their offering documents, so a token would most likely be a digital record tied to those bonds, and altering the terms of the bonds themselves would normally need holder consent.
The first test of the request for proposals is whether it describes a wrapper over existing paper or a new issue, because the legal risk differs. Custody, who may hold a token given the ban on banks holding virtual assets, and which platform PVARA and the State Bank would approve are all unanswered. Cabinet approval comes first, then the request for proposals.
