Pakistan opens crypto licensing portal, sets Sept. 5 deadline for existing firms

Pakistan's shift from an undefined stance to a formal licensing regime is the substantive change here: it converts legal ambiguity into a registration requirement with a hard cutoff, which forces existing operators to either surface and comply or exit. That affects domestic exchanges and custody providers most directly, and signals that authorities want visibility into the sector rather than an outright ban. The open question is enforcement capacity and whether the NOC process becomes a genuine gate or a formality, since the framework's credibility depends on how consistently it is applied after the deadline.