(Jan 22): Lawmakers in some of Asia’s key digital-assets markets are warming to the industry as Donald Trump’s pro-crypto agenda in the US ripples through the region.
Officials in Thailand, Malaysia and Japan are among those to have signaled shifts in their treatment of cryptocurrencies since around the turn of the New Year. The Asia-Pacific region already boasts aspiring crypto hubs in Singapore and Hong Kong and a sleeping giant in China, where an industry ban has curbed activity since 2021.
Trump embraced the digital-assets sector on route to victory in the US presidential election, pledging to make the country the crypto capital of the planet. He was expected to issue an executive order designating the industry a national priority at his inauguration on Monday, Bloomberg News reported previously, but no directive has materialised so far.
Noelle Acheson, author of the Crypto is Macro Now newsletter, suggested after Trump’s election win that “an international scramble to set up crypto market frameworks” would ensue, with nations fretting about falling behind. “Up until now, they could take their time, because the US wasn’t moving on digital assets – now, the race is real,” she said in a Jan 17 newsletter.
Thailand is currently mulling permitting bitcoin exchange-traded funds to list on local exchanges for the first time, following in the footsteps of the US, which cleared similar products for launch in January 2024.
“Like it or not, we have to move along with more adoption of cryptocurrenices worldwide,” Thailand’s Securities and Exchange Commission secretary general Pornanong Budsaratragoon said on Jan 15. The US crop of bitcoin ETFs have accumulated about US$122 billion (RM499.6 billion) in assets just one year after going live.
In Malaysia, Prime Minister Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim said at a recent press conference in the United Arab Emirates that the nation must prioritise blockchain and crypto as it embraces digital transformation. “We should not wait for others to lead the way,” Anwar said. “We cannot afford to start from scratch; we must learn from the experiences of others.”
Trump’s agenda is not the only impetus for change. Singapore and Hong Kong, two of Asia’s global business centres, have worked for years to foster crypto hubs — adding some pressure on others in the region to follow suit.
Even so, Asia’s top financial markets are taking a generally cautious approach to getting up to speed — a stark contrast to developments in the US, where Trump is rapidly undoing a crackdown on the industry led by former US Securities and Exchange Commission chair Gary Gensler under former president Joe Biden.
The Republican and his wife Melania launched so-called memecoins — highly volatile tokens with questionable intrinsic value — ahead of his inauguration on Monday. Trump’s quickly ballooned to a market capitalization of more than US$15 billion, only to have roughly halved by the time he was sworn in, according to CoinMarketCap data.
The potentially lucrative launches unnerved crypto executives and drew immediate rebuke from government watchdogs.
Japan’s handling of digital assets is evolving far more incrementally. The country’s Financial Services Agency began a review in October 2024 that sought to determine whether the current approach of regulating crypto under the payments act was working, Bloomberg News reported previously.
The group conducting the review recently reached a general consensus that the public are starting to recognise crypto as an investment asset, and are therefore discussing whether the government should bring it under financial instruments law, which would offer stronger protection for buyers, according to an FSA official who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Similarly, piecemeal advancements have come in South Korea and Cambodia in recent weeks. South Korea is considering lifting a ban on allowing its institutions to invest in crypto, according to a local media report, while Cambodia’s central bank recently published guidance for banks and payments firms interacting with digital assets.
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