Bangladesh Analyst Pushes Blockchain and AI to Fix a Stock Market in Freefall
A commentary published in The Daily Star on April 15, 2026 argues that permissioned blockchain and artificial intelligence surveillance are the most viable tools available for reversing decades of fraud-driven damage to Bangladesh's capital market.
The proposal arrives as the Dhaka Stock Exchange closed 2025 with zero new IPO listings, a 6.73% decline in its main index, and roughly 66,500 retail investor accounts fully emptied of shareholdings.
Writing in the April 15 edition of The Daily Star, Sazib Kumar Saha makes the case that conventional regulatory enforcement has consistently failed to prevent manipulation on the Dhaka Stock Exchange.
He proposes a two-part technical solution: a permissioned blockchain to create tamper-proof records of every transaction and automate IPO fund releases through smart contracts, paired with AI-driven surveillance to detect coordinated trading patterns and spoofing in real time.
The backdrop to that argument is severe. Bangladesh's stock market capitalization sits at roughly 6% of GDP, one of the lowest ratios in Asia and a fraction of the 100%-plus levels seen in mature markets. The country's two major crashes, in 1996 and again in 2010 to 2011, destroyed an estimated $27 billion in market value, equivalent to about 22% of GDP at the time, according to The Daily Star. Neither event produced meaningful accountability. The Bangladesh Securities and Exchange Commission (BSEC) fined individuals and institutions approximately Tk 1,488 crore (around $135 million USD) over an 18-month period for manipulation, but lengthy legal proceedings have limited actual recovery. Average daily turnover on the DSE fell 18% in 2025 to around Tk 521 crore (roughly $47 million), and total market capitalization stood at $29.66 billion as of February 2026.
Regulatory inconsistency has compounded the trust problem. The IPO lottery allotment system was abolished in 2021 in favor of pro-rata allocation that disproportionately benefited high-net-worth individuals, then reinstated, and ultimately codified in the new Public Offer of Equity Securities Rules 2025. That cycle of reversals has eroded retail investor confidence further.
Saha identifies specific fraud mechanisms that current infrastructure cannot adequately address: coordinated trades routed through omnibus accounts, abuse of placement shares before public listings, diversion of IPO proceeds after listing, and the absence of real-time surveillance tools. His proposed blockchain architecture would log each transaction to an immutable ledger and use smart contracts, self-executing code that enforces predetermined rules, to automate IPO processes by releasing funds to issuers only when independently verified conditions are met.
The AI layer would flag suspicious trading clusters faster than any manual review process. He recommends starting with a phased pilot: blockchain-enabled IPOs first, then AI surveillance in secondary markets, inside a regulatory sandbox operated jointly by BSEC and Bangladesh Bank.
The case for these tools draws on broader regional data. A survey of APAC fintech leaders found that 63.5% cite fraud prevention as a top priority, and research from the same source found that AI combined with blockchain reduces anti-money-laundering false alarms by 60% in Asian fintech contexts. Real-world capital market applications are also emerging: Figure Technologies has originated $17 billion in loans on the Provenance blockchain, and total blockchain-based financial transactions have reached $50 billion according to Pantera Capital.
Former BSEC Chairman Shibli Rubayat Ul Islam pointed in a similar direction when announcing BSEC's FinTech Board digitization initiative. "Digital systems will not only reduce corruption but also curb the activities of those who are involved in manipulation, fraud, and looting in the share market," he said. That initiative is currently being financed through the World Bank's Enhancing Digital Government and Economy project with a 2026 completion target.
Early BSEC reform documents reference "blockchain, AI, and advanced analytics" in capital market operations, though no concrete implementation schedule has been published. Critically, the new Public Offer of Equity Securities Rules, gazetted on December 30, 2025, contain no blockchain or AI provisions.
That gap matters for readers trying to assess where this stands. Saha's piece is an op-ed advocating a policy direction, not a regulatory announcement. BSEC has not confirmed any blockchain pilot. The market context, however, gives the argument genuine urgency. There were no new IPO listings on the DSE throughout 2025. The main DSEX benchmark finished the year at 4,865 points. The DS30 closed at 1,853. These are not figures that point toward recovery without structural intervention.
For markets outside Bangladesh, the proposal carries direct relevance. Nepal and Sri Lanka still rely on manual-heavy IPO processes and face similar trust deficits with retail investors. India offers the most directly comparable regional benchmark: SEBI deployed algorithmic surveillance and electronic IPO book-building during the 2010s, representing the kind of regulatory modernization that BSEC reform advocates are now pointing toward.
Markets in Nigeria, Kenya, and Ghana operate under comparable structural pressures: thin institutional investor bases, dominant retail participation by unsophisticated investors, weak post-listing compliance, and limited surveillance capacity.
Any working case study from Bangladesh implementing blockchain-based IPO infrastructure would represent a replicable model under World Bank and IFC reform mandates that already cover several of those exchanges.
For Web3 developers building permissioned ledger solutions on platforms like Hyperledger Fabric or Corda, or for vendors with AI-based market surveillance products, the BSEC sandbox, if and when it is formally announced, would represent a defined procurement entry point backed by existing World Bank funding. Readers in token ecosystems should note, however, that Saha's proposal does not advocate for public-chain tokenization of securities. The permissioned architecture he describes limits near-term potential for open blockchain protocols, including Ethereum-based real-world asset tokens, in this particular market.
One structural advantage Bangladesh holds is its mobile money ecosystem. Providers including bKash, Nagad, and Rocket already serve millions of users and are integrated into BSEC's current IPO application rules.
That existing digital payment rail would give a blockchain-based share registry a ready connection to retail investors, an advantage that several comparable frontier markets do not share. A further infrastructure signal: in January 2023, the DSE entered a partnership with Nasdaq to modernize core trading technology, a precedent that suggests the foundational upgrades blockchain integration would ultimately require are already under way. Bangladesh also recorded over $429 million in fintech venture capital investment in each of 2021 and 2022, signalling that private sector infrastructure for a technology-led capital market overhaul is not starting from zero.