Pakistan Inks Stablecoin Deal With Trump-Connected Firm

Pakistan signed a stablecoin deal with a company connected to the Trump family’s cryptocurrency firm.

The deal will explore the use of World Liberty Financial’s (WLF) stablecoin for cross-border payments, Reuters reported Wednesday (Jan. 14), citing an unnamed source.

The arrangement marks one of the first publicly announced deals between World Liberty and a sovereign government, and it happens as ties between Pakistan and the United States grow stronger, the report said.

The agreement will see WLF work with Pakistan’s central bank to integrate its USD1 stablecoin into a regulated digital payments structure, according to the report. This will allow the token to operate in tandem with the country’s digital currency infrastructure.

Pakistan has been exploring digital currency efforts in a bid to reduce its reliance on cash and bolster cross-border payments, the report said. The country’s central bank is readying a pilot for a digital currency and is at work on legislation to govern virtual assets.

The news came one week after a WLF subsidiary applied to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency to establish a stablecoin-focused national trust bank.

The charter would position the national trust bank, World Liberty Trust Company, National Association, to issue and custody USD1, which is a dollar-backed stablecoin. The company introduced the stablecoin in March.

Meanwhile, as stablecoins become more enmeshed with the regulated financial space, they are “colliding with a governance problem they were never built to solve,” PYMNTS reported Tuesday (Jan. 13).

Stablecoin firms like Kontigo and BlindPay froze accounts by JPMorgan Chase due to chargebacks that happened when “they opened the floodgates and a bunch of people came in over the internet,” as one executive put it.

“The phrasing is telling,” PYMNTS wrote. “It captures the core compliance anxiety around stablecoins: open access at global scale, combined with limited visibility into counterparties. For banks and other FinTech partners, that combination can be combustible.”

The issue isn’t whether stablecoins can theoretically comply with know your customer, anti-money laundering and sanctions regimes, the report said. Rather, it’s whether public-chain stablecoin systems, constructed on top of decentralized, consensus-based networks, can coexist reliably with centralized compliance expectations and not put their partners at risk.

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