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Changpeng Zhao wants ASEAN to stop making crypto companies file fresh license applications in every single market. He said so publicly at the ASEAN Tech Summit Manila 2026, during a session called “One ASEAN, One Digital Economy,” and the room was listening.
Zhao threw his weight behind a proposal from Lito Villanueva of FinTech Alliance PH. The idea is pretty straightforward: if a crypto firm is already licensed and operating cleanly in one ASEAN country, it should be able to enter the others through a fast-track process — not a full application from scratch. Villanueva put the concept on the table. Zhao picked it up and ran with it, arguing that a regional passporting framework would slash compliance costs, sharpen competition, and ultimately push service quality higher for consumers across the bloc. He didn’t sugarcoat the hard part, though. Technology, he said, is the easy bit. Political coordination is where things get messy.
Not a new idea.
What Passporting Actually Means Here
The word “passporting” sounds technical, but the mechanics aren’t complicated. A firm regulated in, say, Singapore notifies its home regulator that it wants to expand into Vietnam or the Philippines. The host market reviews a slimmed-down filing rather than demanding a brand-new license application with all the documentation that implies. The firm doesn’t have to rebuild its compliance stack from zero every time it crosses a border.
ASEAN doesn’t have that right now. Not for crypto, anyway. Each member state runs its own digital asset rulebook, which means a company trying to operate across five or six ASEAN markets basically has to fight five or six separate regulatory battles. That’s expensive. It’s slow. And it probably keeps smaller, more innovative firms out of markets they’d otherwise serve well.
What’s interesting is that ASEAN has already proven it can build these kinds of cross-border arrangements in other financial areas. The ASEAN Capital Markets Forum’s Collective Investment Schemes Framework lets funds operate across borders through a streamlined authorization process. Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand launched it back in 2014. The Philippines came on board in 2021. It works. The ACMF also runs something called the ACMF Pass under its Professional Mobility Framework — that one lets investment advisers licensed in one member country register quickly in another without starting over. So the institutional muscle memory is there. ASEAN regulators know how to do mutual recognition. They’ve just never applied it to crypto.
Zhao’s pitch is basically: you’ve done this before, do it again, but for digital assets.
The EU Model Hovering in the Background
He’s not the only one pointing at Europe. The EU’s Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation — MiCA — gives authorized crypto entities the ability to offer services across member states once they’re licensed in one. A firm licensed in France can passport into Germany, Spain, Portugal. The home regulator handles the notification. The host regulator gets a heads-up. Business moves. It’s not frictionless, but it’s miles better than filing fresh applications in 27 countries.
Zhao sees something like that as a possible model for ASEAN. The bloc is obviously different — ten countries, wildly different income levels, different legal traditions, different attitudes toward financial risk. Getting Jakarta, Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur, Manila, and Singapore to agree on a shared baseline for crypto licensing is genuinely hard. He didn’t pretend otherwise. But he argued the lighter application process for firms already licensed somewhere in the region is achievable, even if full harmonization isn’t.
Whether ASEAN regulators are ready to move on it is unclear. The proposal is still a discussion, not a policy. Regional stakeholders are talking, but no unified framework has been set up yet.
Why the Fragmentation Hurts
Right now, the fragmentation costs real money. A company building a regional crypto or stablecoin operation across ASEAN has to run parallel compliance programs in each jurisdiction, hire local legal teams in each market, and manage timelines that rarely line up. That overhead doesn’t just hit big exchanges — it hits mid-size firms that might otherwise bring genuine competition to markets currently dominated by a handful of players.
Zhao’s argument is that more competition is good for consumers. Easier cross-border operations bring more firms into each market. More firms means better products, lower fees, and faster innovation. It’s a fairly standard pro-competition case, but it lands differently when you’re talking about a region of roughly 680 million people with fast-growing mobile-first economies and rising stablecoin adoption.
Villanueva’s proposal, which Zhao backs, doesn’t ask ASEAN to tear up its existing regulatory structures. It asks regulators to recognize each other’s work. A firm that’s already passed scrutiny in one market probably doesn’t need to prove the same things all over again somewhere else. That’s the core of it.
The technical infrastructure to support cross-border crypto services is largely already there, per Zhao. The gap is political. Getting ten governments to trust each other’s licensing standards enough to accept a streamlined process — that’s the real project. And it’s probably a long one.
No timeline has been announced. No working group has been named publicly. The conversation is live, but the policy is not.
Frequently Asked Questions
What did Changpeng Zhao say about crypto passporting at the ASEAN Tech Summit Manila 2026?
Zhao backed a proposal by Lito Villanueva of FinTech Alliance PH that would let firms already licensed in one ASEAN market enter others through a streamlined process, arguing it would cut compliance costs and boost competition across the region.
Does ASEAN already have any cross-border financial licensing frameworks?
Yes — the ASEAN Capital Markets Forum’s Collective Investment Schemes Framework has allowed funds to operate across borders since 2014, with Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand as founding members and the Philippines joining in 2021.
