The following guest post was written by Nabil Sorkar, Verse Community Member.

DHAKA, Bangladesh — On a sweltering Wednesday morning in Mirpur, a working-class district in the north of this capital city, Rafiq Ahmed cast his vote for the first time. He is 22 years old, a freelance graphic designer, and one of roughly 127 million Bangladeshis choosing a new parliament today in the most consequential election the country has seen in a generation.

He is also, by the government’s definition, a criminal.

Ahmed — who asked that his real name not be used — holds about $1,400 in a digital wallet on Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange. He earns in USDT, a dollar-pegged stablecoin, from clients in Dubai and Singapore, converts it to Bangladeshi taka through a peer-to-peer network linked to his bKash mobile wallet, and uses it to pay rent. The entire process takes about nine minutes. It is also, according to Bangladesh Bank, punishable by up to seven years in prison.

“Everyone I know does this,” he said, standing outside a polling station at a government primary school. “The government says it’s illegal. But nobody has told us what the legal alternative is.”

He is not alone. Not remotely.

Despite one of the most restrictive cryptocurrency prohibitions in Asia, Bangladesh has emerged as one of the world’s fastest-growing crypto markets — a fact that has startled regulators, emboldened the country’s tech industry, and created a dilemma that whoever wins today’s election will be forced to confront.

According to Chainalysis, the blockchain analytics firm whose annual index is considered the industry benchmark, Bangladesh leapt from 35th to 13th in global cryptocurrency adoption in a single year. An estimated 3.1 million Bangladeshis now hold crypto wallets, roughly one in every 50 people in the country. The growth rate exceeds 40 percent annually, and the vast majority of activity — analysts estimate more than 90 percent — is linked not to speculation, but to something far more practical: sending money home.

Bangladesh received a record $30 billion in remittances in the fiscal year ending June 2025, a 25.5 percent increase over the previous year, according to central bank data. The money flows primarily from the Gulf states — Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar — where millions of Bangladeshi workers labor in construction, domestic service and hospitality. But sending that money home through conventional channels is extraordinarily expensive. The World Bank estimates the cost at $9.40 for every $100 transferred, the highest rate in South Asia, including roughly $3 in fees and $6.30 lost to unfavorable exchange rates.

Through stablecoins, the same transfer costs about $1.50 and arrives in minutes rather than days.

“When you understand the remittance math, you understand why the ban failed,” said a senior analyst at a Dhaka-based fintech consultancy who was not authorized to speak publicly. “You’re asking people to voluntarily pay six times more. Of course they found another way.”

Today’s vote is Bangladesh’s first genuinely competitive election since 2008. Every election in the intervening years was either boycotted by the opposition or widely regarded as rigged. The path here was violent and dramatic: in August 2024, a student-led uprising — driven by fury over a discriminatory government jobs quota — toppled Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, who fled to India, where she remains. A Nobel laureate, Muhammad Yunus, was installed to lead an interim caretaker government. The Awami League, Hasina’s party, which had ruled for 15 consecutive years, is barred from participating.

The race has narrowed to two main blocs. The Bangladesh Nationalist Party, led by Tarique Rahman — the son of former Prime Minister Khaleda Zia, campaigning from a conviction-shadowed exile that ended only recently — heads a 10-party coalition and is widely considered the frontrunner. Opposing him is an 11-party alliance anchored by Jamaat-e-Islami, Bangladesh’s largest Islamist party, in an unlikely coalition with the National Citizen Party, a new political formation born directly from the student uprising and led by Nahid Islam, one of its most prominent figures. Islam is 26 years old.

Neither bloc has said a word about cryptocurrency in its manifesto.

And yet the outcome of this election may matter more for the future of digital assets in Bangladesh than any central bank circular issued in the last decade — because of who is voting, what they want, and what the country’s economy now demands.

The single most striking demographic fact about today’s electorate is its youth. According to the Bangladesh Election Commission, 55.65 million registered voters — 44 percent of the total — are under 37 years old. A survey by the Bangladesh Youth Leadership Centre found that 97 percent of voters aged 18 to 35 intend to cast a ballot, a level of engagement that analysts attribute directly to the politicizing effect of the 2024 uprising.

This is the generation that toppled a government with smartphones and Telegram channels. It is also the generation that adopted cryptocurrency.

The overlap is not coincidental. Bangladesh’s crypto users skew overwhelmingly young and urban — university students, freelancers, digital workers in Dhaka, Chittagong and Sylhet who earn in dollars through platforms like Fiverr and Upwork and have no convenient way to convert those earnings to local currency through the banking system. For them, the Binance peer-to-peer market, accessed through a VPN, is not an ideological statement. It is infrastructure.

“These young people are not crypto enthusiasts,” said Syed Almas Kabir, the former president of the Bangladesh Association of Software and Information Services, known as BASIS, the country’s most influential technology trade group. “They are workers who need to get paid. Cryptocurrency is the future. We cannot be in denial.”

The legal architecture of Bangladesh’s crypto ban is, by the admission of the government’s own officials, something of a mess.

No specific law prohibits the ownership or trading of cryptocurrency. Instead, Bangladesh Bank — the central bank — has relied on a series of escalating circulars, the most significant being Foreign Exchange Policy Department Circular No. 24, issued in September 2022, which directed all banks, nonbank financial institutions and mobile financial service providers to block transactions related to “virtual assets.” Violations, the circular stated, were punishable under the Foreign Exchange Regulation Act of 1947 — a statute written during the British partition of India, four years before Bangladesh existed as a country.

The contradictions surfaced publicly in 2021, in an exchange that has become something of a dark comedy in Dhaka’s fintech circles. The Criminal Investigation Department of the Bangladesh Police wrote to the central bank asking, plainly, whether cryptocurrency was legal. An assistant director in the Foreign Exchange Policy Department wrote back: the ownership of cryptocurrency, he said, “does not appear to be a crime.” The central bank’s official spokesperson then publicly contradicted him, insisting the bank’s position “didn’t change at all.” The C.I.D. subsequently declared crypto illegal.

The legal grey area persists. More than 200 crypto-related cases were brought in 2025, but enforcement has focused on large-scale operators — mining farms, high- volume OTC dealers — rather than the millions of individuals using peer-to-peer platforms for everyday transactions. The result is a prohibition that is aggressive enough to prevent legitimate businesses from operating, but permissive enough for an underground market to flourish.

What makes Bangladesh’s position increasingly difficult to sustain is not just what is happening inside its borders, but what is happening next door.

In 2025, Pakistan — long considered Bangladesh’s closest economic and demographic comparator in South Asia — underwent one of the most rapid crypto-regulatory pivots anywhere in the world. The government established the Pakistan Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority, or PVARA, and by December had granted no-objection certificates to Binance and HTX, two of the world’s largest exchanges. A Pakistan Crypto Council was formed to coordinate policy. The country now ranks third globally in crypto adoption, according to Chainalysis.

India, the regional giant, took a different approach — imposing a punishing 30 percent flat tax on crypto gains in 2022, plus a 1 percent tax deducted at source on every transaction — but crucially, it kept the market legal. The tax regime drove activity underground and offshore, but it also generated significant government revenue and preserved the option of future regulatory refinement.

Bangladesh, by contrast, chose total prohibition. It is now the most restrictive major economy in South Asia on digital assets, a position shared, among significant nations, primarily with China.

“There’s a growing awareness in Dhaka that the neighborhood has moved on,” said a policy researcher at a Dhaka-based think tank who studies financial regulation. “When Binance is licensed in Islamabad and banned in Dhaka, that’s a hard position to defend indefinitely.”

The economic case for reconsidering the ban is built on a single, overwhelming number: $30 billion.

That is the volume of formal remittances that entered Bangladesh in the last fiscal year. The actual figure, including informal channels like the hundi and hawala networks that have historically diverted billions from the banking system, is certainly higher. The government has waged a sustained campaign to bring remittances into formal channels — and has succeeded, with formal inflows rising more than 25 percent in a year.

But the campaign has collided with a stubborn reality: the formal channels are expensive. A Bangladeshi construction worker in Riyadh who sends $200 home each month loses roughly $19 to fees and exchange-rate margins. Over a year, that is $228 — nearly a full month’s savings — transferred not to his family in Sylhet but to the intermediaries who stand between them.

Stablecoin transfers eliminate most of that cost. Industry data suggests the equivalent transaction through a peer-to-peer stablecoin network costs about $3, with settlement in minutes. If even one-third of Bangladesh’s remittance volume migrated to stablecoin rails, the aggregate savings to Bangladeshi workers and their families would exceed $260 million annually, according to calculations based on World Bank cost data.

That figure — $260 million returned to some of the poorest households in South Asia — is, advocates argue, the moral and economic core of the case for legalization.

No one in Dhaka’s policy establishment expects the next government, whichever coalition forms it, to legalize cryptocurrency in its first year. The priorities are too urgent and too numerous: an IMF program that must be kept on track, a banking sector scarred by years of politically directed lending, the fraught process of graduating from least-developed-country status in November, and the basic work of restoring institutional credibility after years of autocratic decay.

But several forces are converging that could produce movement within two to three years.

The BNP, the likely winner, has pledged to bring PayPal to Bangladesh and to create 10 million new jobs, many in the digital economy. The party’s manifesto speaks of “a modern, open financial system.” The step from licensing PayPal to licensing a crypto exchange is, in regulatory terms, not a large one.

The IMF’s $4.7 billion program is pushing Bangladesh toward a market-determined exchange rate and broader financial liberalization. A crawling peg was adopted in June 2025 as a compromise, but the direction of travel is toward openness. Each step in that direction makes a blanket crypto ban harder to justify on the grounds of capital control.

And then there is the revenue argument. India’s 30 percent crypto tax applies to a market of more than 90 million users. Bangladesh’s 3.1 million users represent an entirely untaxed population. A modest 15 percent capital gains levy on estimated crypto activity could generate $150 million to $250 million a year for a government that desperately needs revenue — a point that has not been lost on officials at the National Board of Revenue, according to people familiar with internal discussions.

Perhaps the most likely first step, analysts say, is a narrow opening: regulated stablecoin corridors for remittances, possibly through a partnership between mobile financial service providers like bKash and international stablecoin issuers, operating under a limited central bank license. It would not be full legalization. But it would be a crack in the wall — and in markets like these, cracks tend to widen.

There is one more variable that is unique to Bangladesh, and it is not economic.

Bangladesh is approximately 90 percent Muslim, and Jamaat-e-Islami — a party with deep roots in Islamic jurisprudence — is a significant force in today’s election. The question of whether cryptocurrency is permissible under Islamic law remains actively debated among scholars worldwide. Egypt’s Grand Mufti has ruled it impermissible. Indonesia’s top clerical body has ruled it permissible under conditions. The Gulf states, where most Bangladeshi workers live, are building entire regulatory regimes around it.

In Bangladesh, the question has not yet been formally posed. Jamaat’s 2026 “Policy Summit” called for a knowledge-based economy but did not mention cryptocurrency. But several analysts noted that stablecoins — which are pegged to real assets, low in volatility, and designed for transactional utility rather than speculation — may be more easily accommodated within an Islamic financial framework than volatile tokens like Bitcoin.

“If you can frame stablecoins as a tool for helping workers send money to their families at a lower cost, the Sharia argument becomes much easier to make,” said a financial technology researcher based in Dhaka. “That’s not speculation. That’s maslaha” — a term in Islamic jurisprudence meaning public interest or welfare.

Back in Mirpur, the lines at the polling station stretched down the block by midmorning. The election would not change Rafiq Ahmed’s life immediately. He would continue to earn in USDT, convert through Binance’s peer-to-peer network, and deposit into his bKash wallet. He would continue to do so, technically, in violation of the law.

But something had shifted, he said. The old government was gone. The students had won. The world was watching. And for the first time, he felt that the system might eventually catch up with the reality he had been living for years.

“I voted for the future,” he said. “I hope the future votes for us.”

Reporting for this story was contributed from Verse Community Members in Dhaka. Join the community t.me/GetVerse.

• Is cryptocurrency legal in Bangladesh? No — Bangladesh Bank prohibits crypto transactions under foreign exchange rules, with penalties that can include prison time.
• Why are millions of Bangladeshis still using crypto? Many use stablecoins for cheaper, faster remittances and freelance payments compared with traditional banking channels.
• How large is crypto adoption in Bangladesh? Bangladesh ranks 13th globally in cryptocurrency adoption, with an estimated 3.1 million users.
• Could the new government legalize crypto? While no party has pledged reform, mounting remittance savings and regional regulatory shifts may push policymakers to reconsider the ban.

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