Vietnam’s New Crypto Licensing Plan Set for 2026 to Regulate Digital Asset Platforms

Vietnam is moving fast. The country wants to license crypto-asset service providers under a pilot legal framework, with operations expected to kick off in 2026. It’s a significant shift for a market that has long operated in a regulatory gray zone.

The details came out of a September 15 meeting in Vienna between Vietnamese Deputy Minister of Finance Nguyen Duc Chi and Mariana Kuhnel, Executive Director of the Austrian Financial Market Authority. The State Securities Commission of Vietnam confirmed the meeting. SSC Chairwoman Vu Thi Chan Phuong said Vietnam is pulling from two main sources to build its supervisory structure: recommendations from the Financial Action Task Force and regulatory models already in use across the European Union. The framework will cover risk management, investor asset protection, and anti-money laundering measures — basically the full stack of what regulators expect from any serious digital asset regime.

Not a small undertaking.

What the Pilot Framework Actually Covers

The pilot is designed to grant licenses to digital asset platforms, letting them operate legally once the framework goes live. Phuong also flagged that Vietnam is weighing a restructuring of stock trading boards, with a particular focus on boards tied to small- and medium-sized enterprises. The goal there is pretty clear: more transparency, better product quality, and fewer chances for market manipulation to take hold.

Chi pushed hard on the SME angle too. He said updating policies to support governance and compliance for small and medium businesses is a priority. These enterprises make up roughly 99% of businesses in Vietnam — so whatever gets built here matters at scale. The updates are meant to help SMEs get better access to credit and capital markets, with digital transformation playing a central role in that push.

Kuhnel, for her part, laid out how Austria fits into all this. The FMA doesn’t write EU financial rules — Brussels does that — but the FMA is responsible for actually implementing and enforcing them on the ground in Austria. That covers banks, insurers, investment firms, stock exchanges, and crypto service providers. It’s a broad mandate, and Vietnam seems to want a closer look at how Austria handles it in practice.

Austria’s FMA as a Regulatory Blueprint

The FMA was established in 2002, and it’s spent over two decades building out a compliance and enforcement architecture that now has to deal with digital assets alongside traditional finance. For Vietnam, that kind of institutional experience is probably exactly what it’s looking for as it tries to avoid the mistakes other markets made when crypto first started scaling.

See also: CFTCs Major Crypto Asset Regulation Proposal Reaches White House for Review

Kuhnel proposed online technical workshops and tighter coordination through the International Organisation of Securities Commissions — IOSCO — as concrete next steps. Chi said yes. He wants shared expertise turned into actual joint activities, not just goodwill statements. That’s a meaningful distinction. A lot of bilateral financial meetings produce communiqués and not much else. Chi’s framing suggests Vietnam is after something more operational.

Stablecoin adoption and peer-to-peer crypto trading have grown sharply across Southeast Asia in recent years, and Vietnam has been one of the more active markets in the region. That kind of ground-level activity without a formal legal structure creates real risks — for consumers, for platforms, and for the government’s ability to collect data or enforce rules when things go wrong. A licensing regime, even a pilot one, gives regulators something to work with.

What Comes Next for Platforms and Investors

It’s unclear yet exactly which types of platforms will qualify under the pilot or what the application process will look like. No details on fee structures, capital requirements, or timelines for license approvals have come out of the SSC announcement. Those specifics matter a lot for exchanges and wallet providers trying to decide whether to formalize operations in Vietnam or wait and see.

What’s clear is that Vietnam isn’t building this in isolation. The FATF angle is important — Vietnam has worked to address concerns about its anti-money laundering controls in recent years, and aligning the crypto framework with FATF standards is probably as much about international credibility as it is about domestic enforcement.

See also: FCAs New Crypto Ad Rules Mandate Risk Disclosures and 24-Hour Cooling-Off Period

The EU regulatory model, particularly MiCA — the Markets in Crypto-Assets regulation — gives Vietnam a relatively fresh template to borrow from. MiCA only came into full effect recently, so Vietnam would be adopting a framework that’s already been stress-tested to some degree by regulators in Europe.

Chi and Kuhnel’s meeting in Vienna on September 15 was the starting gun, not the finish line. The SSC still has work to do before any licenses actually get issued.