Vietnam's Crypto Thunderdome: Five Banking Titans and Bros Vie for First Exchange License as Offshore Platforms Face the Banhammer

Five Vietnamese corporate contenders are reportedly entering the ring to launch the nation's first officially sanctioned crypto exchanges. This strategic push coincides with a regulatory crackdown designed to repatriate trading volume and potentially blacklist foreign platforms, a classic "build it and they will come... or else" maneuver.

Per a Reuters report citing a March finance ministry document, five hopefuls have survived the initial qualification gauntlet. The lineup features affiliates of private banking heavyweights Techcombank, VPBank, and LPBank, alongside stockbroker VIX Securities and the sprawling Sun Group conglomerate. VPBank and Sun Group have apparently gone on the record to confirm their applications, signaling they're ready to play ball with the regulators.

Vietnam officially opened the license application gates back in January. This move followed freshly minted procedures from the finance ministry and a landmark law that, for the first time, acknowledges crypto assets as property—though it still firmly bans using them to buy your morning pho or settle any other debts.

The country has quietly evolved into a crypto trading powerhouse, ranking a staggering fourth globally on Chainalysis's latest adoption index. An estimated $200 billion in transaction volume flowed through the nation in the year to June, proving the local degen spirit is alive and well, even if most of that action is still happening on offshore exchanges like Binance, OKX, and Bybit.

Not content with just building a domestic sandbox, authorities are also reportedly drafting rules that could outright ban Vietnamese nationals from accessing those very offshore platforms. Officials have voiced concerns about capital flight and the growing use of crypto and stablecoins, essentially worrying the money is having too much fun abroad without sending postcards home.

Back in September 2025, Vietnam kicked off a five-year crypto pilot program with rules tighter than a trader's stop-loss on a leveraged long. The framework mandates all transactions be in Vietnamese dong, limits issuance to locally registered entities, and notably bans fiat-backed stablecoins, permitting only tokens backed by real, tangible, non-financial assets—so your meme coin backed by "vibes" need not apply.

Thanks to notoriously steep entry conditions—including a capital requirement rumored to be around a cool $379 million—the Ministry of Finance reported precisely zero companies had applied for its digital asset trading pilot by last October. It seems the barrier to entry was set so high, even the most ambitious players decided to watch from the sidelines for a round.

In a February development, Vietnam drafted a tax framework for crypto that would treat digital assets much like securities. The proposal suggests a 0.1% tax on individual transactions processed through licensed providers, while such transfers would mercifully remain exempt from value-added tax, sparing everyone some extra accounting headache.

For corporate entities, the taxman's approach gets more serious. Institutional investors would face a standard 20% corporate income tax on profits from crypto trading, calculated after deducting all the requisite costs and expenses, because even in crypto, the government always gets its cut.