Crypto regulation heat map: Where does your country rank?

The editorial team at Tech in Asia has been talking about crypto regulation since the meltdown of TerraLabs in May last year.

Over the past year, many countries have progressed toward fixing the problems that led to the current crypto winter, but only a very few countries have come up with comprehensive reforms.

No country – usually by their own admissions – has a complete regulatory framework that covers the entire industry.

To help you follow all these developments, we’ve created a regulatory heat map. Above, you’ll find the countries most involved in crypto, so you can see where the most progress is being made.

We looked at everything from the basic questions such as “Is crypto legal?” to more complex questions like “Does the country differentiate between centralized and decentralized exchanges?”

We have also compiled a regulatory tracker below to help you keep track of the latest updates.

How we did it

First, the map is meant to show who is regulating and who isn’t. It doesn’t indicate the strictness of the regulations or how well-thought out they are. We will get to those later.

For each country, we looked at four questions in four categories.

General regulations

• Is crypto (as a whole) legal?
• How many different agencies are involved in regulating the sector?
• Are there any established laws?
• Is the government actually regulating crypto or just talking about it?

How tokens are traded

• Is a license required to operate an exchange?
• Has the government passed any laws specifically on crypto exchanges?
• Does the government differentiate between centralized and decentralized exchanges?
• Does the government require decentralized exchanges to be licensed?

Decentralized finance (DeFi) is causing problems for regulators, and the category often gets lumped in as a virtual asset service provider (VASP), a catch-all category for any platform that handles token exchanges.

Because of that, some countries do require DeFi platforms to be licensed, even if there are no laws on how to handle the peculiarities of that sector.

Stablecoins

• Does the government regulate the issuance of tokens in the country?
• Does the country allow its own currency to back the tokens?
• Can stablecoins be legally traded on an exchange?
• Has the country enacted any policies or passed any regulations on unbacked (algorithmic) stablecoins?

Non-fungible tokens (NFTs)

Breakdown by country