Pakistan is repeatedly described as one of the world’s largest crypto markets, but there is still no publicly reproducible figure for how many unique people in the country actively use cryptocurrency.
The number most often cited is around 40 million.
Government and regulatory officials have used that figure several times in 2026. On June 12, Radio Pakistan reported that Pakistan had “over forty million crypto users,” alongside an annual transaction-volume estimate exceeding $300 billion. In May, PVARA Chairman and State Minister Bilal Bin Saqib said around 40 million Pakistanis were already engaged with digital assets, according to Dawn. In September, Geo reported that Saqib told a Senate committee that around 40 million Pakistanis held cryptocurrency-linked accounts. The government’s Press Information Department has also recently described Pakistan as having more than 40 million virtual-asset users, attributing the figure to independent global adoption indices.
An account, however, is not the same unit as a person: one individual can hold accounts on multiple platforms, and the public data available today measures several different things, accounts, transaction activity, estimated adoption, investor surveys and on-chain flows, none of which map cleanly onto each other.
A User Count Is Not the Same as an Adoption Index
One of the strongest independent indicators of Pakistan’s crypto activity is Chainalysis’ Global Crypto Adoption Index.
In its 2025 index, Chainalysis ranked Pakistan third globally, behind India and the United States. Pakistan ranked second for retail centralized-service activity, third for total centralized-service activity, tenth for DeFi activity and third for institutional centralized-service activity.
[Source attribution: Chainalysis, 2025 Global Crypto Adoption Index.]
But this is not a census of Pakistani crypto users. Chainalysis estimates cryptocurrency transaction volumes associated with different countries and then adjusts its calculations using factors including population size and purchasing power. Its 2025 methodology used four sub-indices covering centralized services, retail centralized activity, DeFi and institutional centralized activity. The retail component, for example, measures estimated crypto value received by centralized services in retail-sized transactions, which Chainalysis defines as transactions below $10,000. The resulting rankings indicate the intensity and distribution of crypto activity; they do not tell us exactly how many individual people generated that activity. Chainalysis itself notes that web-traffic-based geographic attribution has limitations, including the use of VPNs.
A country can have a very high level of crypto activity without having a directly measured count of unique individuals. Pakistan’s 2025 ranking is strong evidence of substantial crypto activity. It is not independent confirmation of the officially cited user base.
Why the 2026 Chainalysis Ranking Cannot Be Read as a Simple Year-on-Year Score
Pakistan does not appear in the published top 20 of the 2026 Global Crypto Adoption Index. Read alone, that could look like a fall from third place to outside the top 20. It isn’t, because Chainalysis substantially changed the methodology for the 2026 index.
The new framework measures four factors: service flows, domestic peer-to-peer activity, cross-border flows and on-chain balances. The reporting period covers July 1, 2025 through June 30, 2026.
[Source attribution: Chainalysis, 2026 Global Crypto Adoption Index.]
The 2025 index was built around estimated transaction activity across centralized services and DeFi, with separate retail and institutional components. The 2026 index uses a different framework designed to capture the structure of national crypto economies more broadly. The change is particularly relevant to Pakistan because peer-to-peer and cross-border activity are important parts of the country’s crypto market, and some of that activity is difficult to observe through conventional centralized-service measurements. A ranking change needs to be read alongside the methodology, not treated as a simple year-on-year measurement of user growth or decline.
P2P Makes Pakistan Harder to Measure
Pakistan’s crypto activity is also difficult to capture because not all users interact with the market in the same way. Centralized exchanges provide one measurable layer of activity. On-chain transactions provide another. Peer-to-peer transfers, cross-border flows and informal arrangements add further layers, and the 2026 Chainalysis methodology explicitly incorporates domestic P2P activity and cross-border flows for this reason.
A recent Chainalysis regional analysis found that Pakistan’s measured utility activity, which included domestic P2P and cross-border inflows, rose from $69 million in the 2025 measurement period to $351 million in the 2026 period, growth Chainalysis described as 736% from a very small base.
[Source attribution: Chainalysis, 2026 Southeast Asia, Central Asia and Oceania crypto adoption analysis.]
This figure should not be confused with the size of Pakistan’s overall crypto market; it covers one specific component of Chainalysis’ methodology. Someone using crypto through an exchange may appear in centralized-service data. Someone moving value through P2P channels may be measured differently. Someone holding assets without transacting during the measurement period may contribute little or nothing to transaction-volume measures. A single national user count is difficult to construct from public blockchain data alone, for exactly this reason.
What Surveys Tell Us About Pakistani Crypto Users
Surveys can provide information that blockchain activity cannot, particularly about motivations and self-reported behavior, though they carry their own limitations.
A 2023 survey of 500 Pakistani crypto investors commissioned by KuCoin found that trading was the most commonly reported use case, followed by holding crypto and peer-to-peer transfers. Thirty-three percent of respondents cited protection against currency depreciation as a motivation, and 29% reported using crypto for P2P transfers.
[Source attribution: Dawn, reporting on KuCoin’s 2023 survey of 500 Pakistani crypto investors.]
Sixty-six percent of respondents were male. Gen Y accounted for 47% of the sample and Gen Z for 35%.
These figures describe a particular surveyed population, not a demographic census of Pakistan’s entire crypto market, since the survey sampled people who were already crypto investors and cannot tell us what percentage of the total population owns cryptocurrency. Other academic surveys face similar limitations: useful for attitudes, motivations and behavior, but not extrapolable into a national user count without a representative sampling framework. A survey can tell us why people say they use crypto. An on-chain analysis can tell us about observable activity. An exchange dataset can show activity within a particular platform. None of those automatically tells us how many unique Pakistanis use cryptocurrency.
What Are Pakistanis Using Crypto For?
The available evidence points to several overlapping use cases rather than one dominant reason. Trading is clearly important, the 2023 KuCoin survey reported it as the most common use case among respondents. Currency protection is a recurring theme, with 33% of that same survey’s respondents citing hedging against rupee depreciation. P2P transfers also feature prominently in available research.
Stablecoins are particularly relevant because they let users hold or transfer assets denominated in currencies such as the US dollar without directly holding dollars in a traditional bank account, though the public evidence does not currently provide a reliable national figure for the number of Pakistanis using stablecoins specifically. Cross-border activity matters for similar reasons, given the country’s large overseas diaspora and significant international payment flows, but available public datasets do not provide a clean count of Pakistani crypto users whose primary purpose is remittances, freelancing or cross-border payments.
One person may trade Bitcoin, hold USDT, use P2P transfers and receive international payments through crypto. Counting each activity separately would produce multiple observations for the same individual, which is why these use cases are better treated as overlapping than mutually exclusive.
What We Still Cannot Measure Reliably
Several basic questions about Pakistan’s crypto market remain unanswered publicly:
- A nationally representative, independently reproducible count of unique active crypto users.
- A publicly documented methodology that would let outside researchers reconstruct the official estimate and determine exactly what qualifies someone as a user.
- A reliable national breakdown of how many Pakistani users primarily trade, hold, make payments, use stablecoins, participate in DeFi or use crypto for cross-border transfers.
- A sufficiently robust public dataset showing the number of crypto users by Pakistani city.
The difference between an account, a wallet, an investor, a transacting user and an active user can be substantial. A market with tens of millions of accounts would look very different from a market with the same number of unique active individuals, and a market with a few million highly active users could generate more transaction volume than a much larger group of occasional users. Without consistent definitions, these figures cannot be treated as interchangeable.
Why the Measurement Problem Matters for Companies Entering Pakistan
For international exchanges, stablecoin companies, payment providers, blockchain infrastructure firms and other virtual-asset businesses, this is more than a statistical detail. A company considering Pakistan needs to know not simply how many people have interacted with crypto, but what those users actually do: how many are active traders, how many primarily hold stablecoins, how much activity runs through centralized platforms versus P2P channels, which payment and settlement problems users are trying to solve, how concentrated activity is geographically, and how many users are likely to become customers of a regulated product.
Pakistan is moving toward a more formal regulatory framework through PVARA, but the market intelligence available to businesses, researchers and policymakers remains fragmented. A credible market-entry assessment needs official regulatory information, blockchain analytics, exchange and platform data where available, surveys, payment research and carefully defined proxies, combined. The 40 million figure remains the baseline cited in parliamentary briefings and official statements, and the $351 million in measured P2P and cross-border inflows is the most recent verifiable on-chain data point Chainalysis has published for the same period. Neither, on its own, answers how many unique people in Pakistan actually use cryptocurrency.
