Munir gets immunity through Trump-linked crypto pact

Pakistan is now too financially entangled with a US President to be treated as a rogue actor without triggering blow-back in Washington’s highest office. That is the ultimate insurance policy.

NEW DELHI: On 14 March 2025, the Government of Pakistan launched the Pakistan Crypto Council (PCC), an entity created ostensibly to regulate and promote the country’s digital asset infrastructure.
The PCC was established directly under the Ministry of Finance, with Bilal Bin Saqib, a UK-based entrepreneur and social media personality with limited background in formal financial regulation, appointed as its founding CEO.

Within weeks, he was also named Special Assistant to the Prime Minister on Blockchain and Crypto, and accorded a Minister of State status.
Just over a month later, between 26 and 27 April 2025, the PCC signed a Letter of Intent with World Liberty Financial (WLF), a Delaware-based crypto firm, majority-controlled by the Trump family. This agreement proposed sweeping collaboration on blockchain infrastructure, the use of WLF’s stablecoin (USD1) in Pakistan’s financial system, tokenization of national assets, and establishment of a national DeFi sandbox.
A national DeFi sandbox is a government-led initiative that provides a controlled, supervised environment where decentralized finance (DeFi) projects can test real-world financial applications with relaxed regulatory constraints—while still ensuring oversight and consumer protection.

At the time of signing, the PCC had no parliamentary backing, no regulatory authority under Pakistani law, and crypto remained illegal as per State Bank of Pakistan (SBP) directives.
Yet WLF’s delegation, including co-founders Zachary Folkman and Zachary Witkoff, was granted access to Pakistan’s highest office-holders—Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, Finance Minister Muhammad Aurangzeb, SBP Governor Jameel Ahmad, SECP Chairman Akif Saeed, and most notably, Chief of Army Staff General Asim Munir.
General Munir’s presence in this entire deal is especially significant. The Army has no formal jurisdiction over Pakistan’s financial technology policy. His involvement signals that the agreement had strategic, not merely economic, motivations.
Sources close to the matter have confirmed that the meeting was facilitated through Gulf-based intermediaries with longstanding ties to both the Pakistani military and Trump-linked financial networks.
World Liberty Financial is not an ordinary fintech start-up. It is majority-controlled by entities held by Donald Trump and his immediate family. As of early 2025, Trump and his sons—Donald Jr., Eric Trump, and Barron Trump—collectively retained direct ownership of over 22.5 billion WLFI tokens, the governance token of the WLF ecosystem.

Disclosures show that approximately 75% of revenues generated from token sales were earmarked for entities controlled by the Trump family. Donald Trump himself reported over $57 million in personal income from WLF-related activities in 2024.
On 22 April 2025, a major terror attack orchestrated by Pakistan military and executed by its terror arm, Lashkar-e-Taiba struck Pahalgam in Jammu and Kashmir, killing 26 civilians.
The WLF-PCC deal, signed just four to five days after this mass-casualty attack, raises a troubling hypothesis, one which is likely to be proven in the coming weeks: that the agreement was not an economic initiative but a geopolitical hedge by General Munir—intended to buy goodwill with Donald Trump and his commercial network, knowing the attack would provoke international backlash.
The financial stakes for WLF are non-trivial. By gaining early access to Pakistan’s remittance corridors (over $30 billion annually), WLF positioned its USD1 stablecoin for mass adoption.

Experts say that even a modest penetration of these flows—say 10%—could conservatively yield $75-150 million annually in transaction fees and reserve float for Trump and his family, with significant upside if adoption scales.
According to experts tracking emerging market stablecoin models, such estimates are based on typical revenue structures involving 0.75-2.5% in combined transaction fees, FX spreads, and yield from reserve holdings on volumes ranging from $3-5 billion annually.
Additionally, Pakistan’s offer to allocate 2,000 MW of surplus electricity for crypto mining provides WLF with low-cost infrastructure that would be commercially unviable in regulated U.S. or European jurisdictions.
Further, WLF’s governance token—$WLFI—is largely held by entities linked to the Trump family.
Pakistani institutional participation or state-endorsed integration of $WLFI into national projects could artificially boost its value, creating a direct financial windfall for Trump-owned assets.

Meanwhile, data collected from KYC processes, behavioural analytics, and blockchain usage patterns in Pakistan could be monetized or leveraged geopolitically.
At its core, the WLF–PCC engagement reflects a convergence of three risk vectors: (1) a fragile, military-dominated Pakistani state looking to hedge against diplomatic fallout from cross-border terror; (2) a private U.S. entity with access to a former and now incumbent U.S. President; and (3) a regulatory vacuum enabling non-transparent asset flows.
While marketed as a fintech leap for Pakistan, the deal appears instead to be a geopolitical backchannel—one that monetizes state vulnerability, masks strategic intent, and deepens the opacity between public policy and private gain.
Since Donald Trump’s return to the U.S. presidency in January 2025, the strategic logic behind Munir’s facilitation of the WLF deal has become unmistakably clear. This is not a hedge against a possible Trump victory—it is now a functioning immunity mechanism.
Trump’s re-election transforms WLF from a speculative venture into a politically protected enterprise. Any financial or regulatory action against Pakistan that risks undermining WLF—whether by OFAC, FinCEN, FATF, or even the IMF—would now run into a massive conflict of interest at the top of the U.S. government. The Trump family’s financial exposure creates a prohibitive effect on enforcement agencies.

Agencies under the Executive Branch will be politically constrained from sanctioning or penalizing a foreign state so closely tied to the president’s private income.
This gives Pakistan an unprecedented strategic buffer. Hardline responses to terror escalation, terror financing, or crypto abuse could now be delayed, softened, or entirely neutralized.
Post the deal it was assessed that the IMF, where the U.S. is the largest shareholder, may ease conditionalities to protect what will be described as “private American innovation” in Pakistan. Similarly, it was feared that the FATF may soften technical assessments under diplomatic pressure, especially if Pakistan claims progress on blockchain transparency.
Pakistan is now too financially entangled with a U.S. President to be treated as a rogue actor without triggering blowback in Washington’s highest office. That is the ultimate insurance policy.
The effectiveness of this geopolitical firewall was tested almost immediately and the assessments and concerns proved correct.
Following the 22 April 2025 Pahalgam massacre, India mounted a full diplomatic offensive. Classified dossiers were shared with key stakeholders at the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), urging punitive measures and accountability.

Despite this, the IMF proceeded to release a scheduled $1.2 billion tranche to Pakistan in early May, citing progress in economic reforms and digital infrastructure. No mention was made of the attack or its sponsors. Indian objections were formally noted but had no bearing on the final decision. Behind the scenes, senior IMF officials privately acknowledged that Washington’s delegation did not support withholding funds—despite the gravity of the Pahalgam incident.

Then in June 2025, at the FATF session in France, the matter was again raised. India pressed hard for Pakistan to be relisted on the grey list, presenting intelligence on continued state complicity in terror financing. Yet FATF declined to take any adverse action.
This sequence makes clear that Munir’s achievement was not the crypto deal itself, but its strategic timing. It gave multilateral institutions a plausible excuse to defer hard decisions, and gave the Trump administration a financial reason to mute its own agencies.