Vietnam rushes to pilot regulated crypto market as pressure from global watchdog builds
It has missed the FATF’s deadline by over a year to plug anti-money laundering gaps
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VIETNAM’S cryptocurrency market has grown beyond the reach of domestic regulators to a large extent.
Hanoi is now rushing to pull South-east Asia’s most active cryptocurrency market – and the third largest in Asia-Pacific – onto regulated domestic platforms as pressure mounts to fix its anti-money laundering (AML) gaps.
Hundreds of billions of dollars in digital-asset trading activity are in play as Vietnam moves ahead with a pilot market and related regulations, even as it falls behind in efforts to get off the grey list of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), a global AML watchdog.
The pilot is now moving closer to launch. Five companies have been cleared to proceed under the framework approved in 2025, with the first formal local digital-asset exchange operations potentially starting as early as in the third quarter of 2026.
Vietnam has been on FATF’s grey list since June 2023, a designation that reflects strategic deficiencies in its efforts to combat money laundering, terrorist financing and proliferation financing.
In its last review in June, the Paris-based organisation flagged gaps across 10 broad areas that Vietnam still needs to address, including the regulation of virtual assets and virtual-asset service providers (VASPs).
The country also needs to strengthen suspicious-transaction reporting, financial intelligence, risk-based supervision of financial and non-financial institutions, beneficial-ownership transparency and money-laundering investigations.
The task force strongly urged Vietnam “to swiftly implement its action plan”, reiterating that all deadlines expired in May 2025.
Following FATF’s urging, the country’s government issued a revised plan at the end of June, while noting that it had completed just three of 17 actions under its own plan.
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For digital assets, despite having established a statutory basis through a series of laws and regulations over the past year, the authorities are required to “prove that it is being enforced in practice”.
Why the crypto market matters
Digital assets have become one of the clearest tests of whether Hanoi can turn these legal reforms into effective supervision.
About one in six Vietnamese people – or more than 17 million – owned cryptocurrencies in 2024, indicated a report by crypto payment gateway Triple-A. The country also ranked fourth globally in Chainalysis’ crypto adoption index in 2025.
In the 12 months through to June 2025, Vietnam received more than US$200 billion in cryptocurrency, up 55 per cent from a year earlier, indicated Chainalysis data. It is the third-largest crypto market in Asia-Pacific, behind India and South Korea.
For Vietnam regulators, the stakes extend well beyond plugging oversight gaps in the country’s large crypto market, as rapid adoption has increased its exposure to money laundering and other illicit-finance risks.
To Tran Hoa, a State Securities Commission official involved in overseeing the emerging digital-asset market, linked the market pilot directly to Vietnam’s wider effort to meet FATF standards.
He highlighted requirements for crypto transactions to be registered and tracked through licensed VASPs for AML purposes.
“If we successfully implement the pilot market, we will gain the lessons needed to build a comprehensive legal framework and eventually get off the grey list,” Hoa said at an industry event in mid-August.
He warned that, without further progress, Vietnam could face tougher FATF scrutiny and, in the worst case, risk being moved to the “black list”.
The consequences could “affect the entire economic activity of the country”, particularly as the country pursues double-digit economic growth targets in the coming years, Hoa added.
The economic concern is not abstract.
A 2021 International Monetary Fund working paper examining 89 emerging and developing economies estimated that FATF grey-listing was associated, on average, with a decline in total capital inflows equivalent to about 7.6 per cent of gross domestic product, including lower foreign direct and portfolio investment.
In South-east Asia, Vietnam and Laos remain on FATF’s grey list, while Myanmar is the region’s only jurisdiction on the high-risk “black list”. Cambodia exited the grey list in February 2023, followed by the Philippines two years later.
Pilot exchanges to be launched soon
Licensed operators will need paid-in capital of at least 10 trillion dong (US$381.8 million), 10 operating procedures covering areas including custody, trading, risk management and AML, and information systems meeting Level 4 security standards.
Hoa said the timing of their launch now depends heavily on how quickly these players complete their technology, capital and operating requirements.
“The 10 trillion dong capital threshold is a large figure,” he said. “But at this stage, we need large enterprises and a very firm commitment when they participate in the market.”
Hoa added that regulators would establish rules governing the use of that capital and introduce financial-safety thresholds to ensure licensed exchanges operate prudently and strengthen investor confidence.
The pilot could eventually support a broader range of tokenised real-world assets beyond simple spot trading, including products linked to commodities, cash flows, property projects and green assets.
Crypto that has not been listed on a licensed operator’s platform could still be traded on others, he said, but the transactions would have to be registered through authorised service providers. This would allow the authorities to retain transaction information required for AML reporting.
The first licensed crypto exchange will therefore be more than a new trading venue.
Nguyen Minh Huong, chief executive officer of Sacom Crypto Asset Exchange (SCEX) – one of the five prospective operators that have passed an initial appraisal – said the company is building infrastructure even as detailed regulations have yet to be settled.
“We cannot wait until everything is complete before starting,” Huong stated at the industry event in August. “That is why SCEX is not just building an exchange. We are preparing an entire operating infrastructure for the market.” THE BUSINESS TIMES
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