Crypto regulation in Asia.

Japan has regulated crypto since 2017 through a dedicated licence for crypto exchanges, introduced after several major hacking incidents that prompted caution. Providers must meet strict requirements around safeguarding customer funds, with mandatory separation between company assets and customer holdings, and a large share of customer funds must be held in cold storage.

Japan also maintains a separate list of tokens permitted for trading on registered exchanges, with new tokens going through an assessment process first. This makes the Japanese market more conservative in terms of new coin availability, but gives users a relatively high degree of protection compared with less regulated markets.

Singapore regulates crypto services through the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), which grants licences to providers of digital payment token services. MAS is known for a strict but predictable approach, with explicit attention to consumer protection and restrictions on promoting speculative trading to retail consumers, while the city simultaneously attracts institutions focused on infrastructure and tokenisation.

Hong Kong has in recent years set up a comparable licensing regime for trading platforms, with the explicit goal of positioning itself as a gateway for crypto firms wanting to serve the broader Asian market. Both cities compete to some extent to attract international headquarters of crypto companies, each with their own emphasis in the licensing process.

South Korea has one of the most active retail crypto markets in the world, which has prompted authorities to introduce specific rules around identification and bank linkage. Crypto exchanges must partner with domestic banks that support real-time name verification, so a crypto account can only be linked to a bank account held under the same name.

This requirement has strongly consolidated the market around a limited number of large domestic exchanges able to meet the banking requirements, while smaller and foreign platforms struggle to access the same bank linkages.

The wide spread of approaches across Asia shows there is no global standard for crypto oversight, not even within a single region. An exchange licensed in Japan is therefore not automatically permitted to operate in South Korea or Hong Kong; each country requires its own local licence and adaptation to local identification and custody rules.

For European users this matters mainly because some international platforms operate globally and thus seek licences under several of these regimes simultaneously, while others deliberately focus on a single region. When assessing a platform, it is worth checking exactly which regime it is licensed under, rather than relying on a general impression of trustworthiness.