By Joe Pan
HONG KONG — In a city positioning itself as a digital‑asset hub, a Taiwan lawyer supplied what is considered the only public presentation and detailed account of the historic roadmap for the island’s Virtual Asset (VA) regulations. At a Consensus Hong Kong side event titled “From Silicon Valley to Central,” Henry Lin, whose blueprint is regarded as one of the region’s sharpest, argued that Taiwan’s methodical, regulation-first approach is an ambitious move that could turn it into the region’s “new crypto dragon” — if it can prove that strict rules and real institutions beat hype and yield promises.
Lin, a director at Lin & Partners and founder of the Taiwan Bitcoin Association, told the audience Taiwan deliberately chose to start with anti‑money‑laundering controls rather than rush into licensing regimes. In 2018, virtual asset service providers were brought under the AML Act and the Financial Supervisory Commission was named as the sector’s lead regulator, forcing exchanges to implement known‑your‑customer checks and suspicious‑activity reporting before they could think about expansion. “Regulation started with risk control, not licensing,” one of his slides read, summing up the strategy.
From there, Taiwan moved into what Lin called a “market discipline” phase. In 2023 and 2024 the government introduced a statutory registration system for VASPs, set guiding principles that required customer assets to be segregated from company funds, and pushed the industry to form a national association. The next step, already in motion, is a dedicated Virtual Asset Service Act that would license seven types of platform services, codify stablecoin rules and set terms for foreign exchanges that want local access. “Taiwan aligns with MiCA‑style frameworks,” his roadmap noted, linking the island’s direction to the European Union’s comprehensive regime.
Moderating the panel, Hong Kong Digital Finance Association co‑chair Emil Chan framed the moment as a test of how different jurisdictions can learn from each other rather than compete on regulatory arbitrage. Hong Kong, he reminded the room, has long branded itself a “super‑connector” between East and West; in a fragmented geopolitical landscape, he suggested, the city may now need to connect “the virtual world and the real world” as much as regional capital markets. Showing Taiwan’s ecosystem map in Hong Kong, he said, was meant to be a concrete example of how one Asian market is trying to do that systematically.
That map — unveiled by Lin as a “special announcement” — was dense enough to look like a subway diagram. It listed domestic exchanges registered or approved by the FSC, including players such as HOYA BIT, MaiCoin and BitoPro, alongside payment firms, wallet and custody providers, DeFi protocols, NFT projects, venture capital funds, media outlets and consulting shops. “Taiwan actually is building a mature, regulated and very active crypto market,” Lin told the room, adding that the ecosystem reflects “a maturing sector with strong institutional backing and a clear regulatory path.”
For Chan, that institutional layer is where cross‑border cooperation becomes meaningful. He argued that if Taiwan can show banks, insurers and public companies how to hold digital assets within a clear rulebook, Hong Kong can in turn offer a venue for those firms to plug into global capital and a larger investor base. “Hong Kong used to connect East and West,” Chan said. “Now we have to connect the virtual and the real.”
Panelist Warren Linger, the Founder Institute’s Hong Kong director, picked up that theme from a startup perspective. He said many founders in the region still treat fundraising as a one‑off pitch rather than a long‑term relationship, and he contrasted that with Silicon Valley norms. The regulatory work Taiwan is doing, he suggested, could help entrepreneurs speak a language institutional investors trust. If a founder can say their exchange or token project sits under a MiCA‑style framework, with AML supervision and an industry association, it “sends a very different signal” than a loose offshore structure, he said.
Henry Lin’s data supported that view. According to the statistics behind his map, roughly 75 percent of Taiwan’s blockchain firms were founded in the last five years, the median funding round is around $1.5 million and about a quarter of projects explicitly target North America or Southeast Asia. At the same time, listed companies such as Dafeng TV and Wiztron have begun to incorporate virtual assets into their corporate treasuries, while major banks — including Union Bank, Cathay United Bank, KGI Bank and CTBC Bank — are piloting custody services for institutional funds. Commenting on the inclusion of the island in traditional payment systems, Strategic Business Development Manager at Payment Cards Group, Jayden Mak, noted: ‘We are doing for… this time one has a similar in our daily payments I think when Visa and Mastercard include Taiwan Amazing.’ For Lin, those numbers show “rising capital confidence” in a market that has chosen to embed crypto inside existing financial infrastructure rather than route around it.
The conversation repeatedly circled back to risk. Lin’s roadmap slide bluntly noted that the collapse of FTX had “accelerated regulatory depth” in Taiwan rather than prompting a retreat. That meant, he argued, that consumer protection, segregation of client assets and oversight of platform solvency were being treated as preconditions for growth, not as boxes to tick later.
Audience questions hinted at how controversial that stance could become if other regulators try to match it. Chan acknowledged chatter in Hong Kong policy circles about requiring licensed exchanges or VASPs to carry insurance, effectively guaranteeing some portion of customer balances against hacks or failures. While the panel did not produce a unanimous view, there was clear unease about blanket mandates that might look good on paper but run ahead of what insurance markets can realistically provide.
The Taiwan blueprint is still a work in progress. A draft VASP bill exists but has not yet taken effect; industry surveys that feed into the ecosystem map draw on a sample of just over 100 firms, from DeFi to custodians to media. But the direction of travel is clear: by 2026, Taipei expects a full licensing regime to be in force, stablecoin issuers to be under explicit rules and foreign platforms to have a defined path if they want to serve local users.
For Chan, that is precisely why showcasing Taiwan’s ambition in Hong Kong matters. “We don’t know exactly what the new world will be,” he said, referring to the overlap of Web2 and Web3 finance. “But we can decide whether it will be built on stories, or on rules.” On this night, at least, the emerging consensus was that Asia’s next crypto dragon will breathe regulation before fire.
About the Author
Joe Pan is an editor and producer at Blockwind News. An early adopter of blockchain technology, he has covered major crypto conferences globally since 2019 and moderated Web3 events across Asia. Joe is part of the founding team of Blockwind News and teaches Asia’s first Master of Journalism course on “Covering Cryptocurrency and Blockchain” at Hong Kong Baptist University.
