ZAR Raises $12.9 Million to Bring Stablecoin Payments to Pakistan

Stablecoin-focused startup ZAR reportedly raised $12.9 million in new funding.

The funding will help the year-old company as it works to test dollar-backed digital tokens in Pakistan, one of the most unbanked countries in the world, Bloomberg reported Tuesday (Oct. 28).

The goal is to use mobile kiosks, convenience stores and money agents to help popularize stablecoins, rather than working through large retail or financial platforms, the report said. If this model succeeds, ZAR aims to expand to Africa next year. The company has raised $20 million since its inception.

The funding came as Pakistan’s government increases its support for digital currencies to offset insufficient banking infrastructure, per the report. This year, the country established the Virtual Assets Ordinance, a key move in its effort to legalize and regulate digital currencies.

In the spring, Pakistan’s government met with Michael Saylor, executive chairman of business intelligence company Strategy and holder of the world’s largest corporate bitcoin reserve. Officials at the meeting emphasized Pakistan’s goal of becoming a digital asset leader in the global south.

Saylor praised Pakistan’s approach, calling bitcoin the “strongest asset for long-term national resilience.” He said countries like Pakistan have a chance to make their mark on finance by embracing digital assets early.

In other stablecoin news, PYMNTS wrote this week about the way the illicit version of these coins “are becoming a statistically significant slice of the total, adjusted, stablecoin volume pie.”

Blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis estimated that stablecoins enabled $40 billion in crypto crime between 2022 and 2023, representing around 12% to 16% of total stablecoin market capitalization at year-end during the same period.

“The true question facing industry and regulators today is not just whether stablecoins are ‘stable’ in economic terms, but whether we are fully seeing what moves through them,” PYMNTS wrote Monday (Oct. 27). “The numbers show that legitimate use cases are scaling, but also that [fraudsters] are gravitating toward the very asset class whose features make sense for their purposes.”

However, stablecoins have evolved from “niche curiosity to one of the most important rails in the digital asset ecosystem,” PYMNTS added, used for applications like corporate treasury functions, programmable payments and cross-border settlement.