Draft sub-regulations under Taiwan's virtual asset law limit banks' exchange and transfer services to corporate accounts, leaving the retail demand for swapping and sending tokens with existing operators.
According to the United Daily News and the Economic Daily News, the Financial Supervisory Commission is rushing to draft nine sub-regulations under the Virtual Asset Service Act after its passage. They are due to be announced for comment in November and to take effect by the end of the first quarter of 2027 at the earliest. Drafts on setting up and managing virtual asset service providers (VASPs) and on personnel rules have already been released.
광고 문의 · 300×250What banks can and cannot do
Under the preliminary draft, banks may run four basic businesses: exchange, transfer, custody and underwriting. A fifth, token lending, comes as a plus-one, but only after a bank has run exchange and custody for a year. Banks are barred from acting as trading platform operators.
The key limit is that exchange and transfer are open only to corporate accounts, so the two services retail investors use most, swapping tokens and sending them, cannot be taken on by banks for now and stay with existing VASPs. Lending is only half open as well: banks can lend out tokens but cannot borrow them from customers, and a customer who borrows can only have the original provider exchange them or use them to repay, not move them freely to other wallets or platforms.
Where banks see new business
That does not leave banks empty-handed, and corporate stablecoins are one example. If a Taiwanese company must pay 1 million US dollars to an overseas firm, its bank can swap the dollars into a stablecoin and transfer it to the counterparty, handling a cross-border payment. The corporate-only rule in fact suits this kind of business client.
Staking is another area to watch. The draft lets custodians stake on a client's instruction. On Ethereum a validator needs 32 ETH, so a bank could pool the assets of several clients to take part and share the rewards.
Market readers sum up the regulator's division of labor this way: VASPs keep retail trading volume and fee income, while banks target corporate and cross-border flows. Industry players said the platform ban and corporate-only limit were expected, but that the lending rules were restrictive and confusing. The same page reported that the drafts sharply raise capital and business guarantee thresholds for VASPs and add up several businesses together, which could trigger capital raising and consolidation. Whether corporate stablecoins, custody and staking become real profit sources still depends on market demand.
