Bitcoin tops $77,000 after Bank of Japan hike: Rs 2.14 crore a coin

Bitcoin is trading above $77,000 on Friday morning in Pakistan, up about 1.4 percent in 24 hours, hours after the Bank of Japan raised its policy rate by 25 basis points to 1.25 percent, the highest level since 1995.

At today's interbank dollar rate of Rs 277.28, one Bitcoin is worth roughly Rs 21.4 million, or about Rs 2.14 crore. Ethereum at $2,471 works out to about Rs 685,000 a coin.

Why a Japanese rate decision moves Bitcoin

Japan has been the world's cheap-money supply for two decades. When borrowing yen costs nothing, funds borrow in yen and buy higher-yielding assets elsewhere, which is the carry trade. Every time the BoJ raises rates, part of that borrowing gets unwound, and the riskiest assets on the other end of the trade are usually sold first. Crypto sits at that end.

That is the theory, and it is what happened in earlier hiking rounds. This time the move went the other way: rates up, Bitcoin up. The likeliest reading is that a 25 basis point move that markets had almost fully priced in is not a shock, and traders treated the decision being out of the way as the news.

BoJ executive director Koji Nakamura pointed to Japan's shrinking labour force lifting wages, calling it a structural factor that cannot be dismissed as temporary. That framing matters more than this hike: it signals more increases ahead, and a sustained rise in Japanese rates is a slower, heavier drag on risk assets than any single decision.

What it means for a Pakistani holder

Most people here holding crypto bought it in dollars through a peer-to-peer trade, so their rupee position moves on two things at once: the coin price and the dollar. The rupee has been steady, at Rs 277.28 today against Rs 277.51 yesterday, so almost all of this week's rupee gain is the coin, not the currency.

The legal position has not changed. The State Bank has not authorised banks or payment institutions to process cryptocurrency transactions, and no exchange is licensed to operate here. That leaves buyers in the peer-to-peer market, where the counterparty risk is the whole risk: there is no regulator to complain to, and an account that receives funds from a P2P trade can be frozen if those funds are traced to fraud. The SBP's fresh warning this week about mistaken-transfer scams applies directly to how P2P crypto deals are settled.

Where to watch the numbers

We track the daily close on our Bitcoin price page and Ethereum page, and the rupee on the dollar rate page. To convert a dollar figure into rupees at today's rate, use the currency converter.

Nothing here is investment advice. Crypto is not a regulated product in Pakistan and a position can lose its entire value.