Is crypto legal in Thailand? Rules & regulation (2026)

Thailand officially launched TouristDigiPay, an 18-month sandbox pilot co-supervised by the SEC, Bank of Thailand, AMLO, and Ministry of Tourism allowing foreign tourists to convert BTC, ETH, and other cryptocurrencies into Thai Baht for nationwide QR-code payments. The scheme is Thailand's first live crypto-payment channel since the 2022 payment ban and is designed to capture tourism spending from crypto-holding visitors.

Acting on authority granted by the April 2025 extraterritorial amendment, the SEC and Ministry of Digital Economy and Society began blocking Thai access to five unauthorized foreign digital asset platforms; investors were urged to withdraw funds before the cutoff. The action marked Thailand's first use of website-blocking powers against unlicensed crypto exchanges.

An amendment to the Emergency Decree on Digital Asset Businesses (published in the Royal Gazette 12 April 2025, in force 13 April) extended the SEC's jurisdiction to foreign operators who solicit Thai users, identified by criteria such as .th domains, Thai Baht pricing, or Thai-law dispute clauses. A companion amendment to the 2023 Technology Crimes Decree simultaneously empowered the Ministry of Digital Economy and Society to block non-compliant platforms.

Following a February 2025 public consultation in which a majority supported the proposal, Thailand's SEC officially approved USD Coin (USDC, ~$58 bn market cap) and Tether (USDT, ~$142 bn) for trading on licensed Thai exchanges, the first stablecoins admitted under the regulatory framework. The decision aligns Thailand with global markets where stablecoins are core trading and settlement instruments.

A Royal Decree introduced a personal income tax exemption on capital gains from the sale or exchange of cryptocurrencies and digital tokens traded on SEC-licensed exchanges, effective 1 January 2025 through 31 December 2029. The measure is intended to stimulate domestic trading volumes, migrate retail investors onto regulated platforms, and sharpen Thailand's competitiveness in the regional digital asset market.

Thailand's SEC launched a formal regulatory sandbox open to all six classes of licensed digital asset businesses, permitting innovation testing in a supervised environment for a renewable one-year term. The sandbox is intended to incubate emerging products, including crypto ETFs, tokenized bond and fund units, and programmable-payment solutions, within the existing regulatory perimeter.

Thailand's SEC announced the prohibition of deposit-taking, staking-reward, and lending services offered by licensed digital asset operators after a public hearing, a direct regulatory response to systemic risks exposed by the collapses of Celsius Network and Voyager Digital earlier in 2022. The ban closed a significant gap in consumer protection and drew a clear line between crypto investment and crypto yield products.

Amended SEC notifications effective 1 July 2022 required crypto operators to administer investor knowledge tests before onboarding retail clients and to publicly disclose service-quality and IT-capacity data; companion regulations simultaneously introduced a formal licensing regime for digital asset custodial wallet service providers approved by the Ministry of Finance. These were Thailand's first detailed retail-investor safeguards in the crypto sector.

An SEC notification issued 23 March 2022 prohibited all licensed digital asset operators from facilitating cryptocurrency use as payment for goods, services, or other obligations, with fines up to THB 300,000 plus THB 10,000 daily penalties, effective 1 April 2022. The ban, driven by concerns over price volatility, money-laundering exposure, and financial-system stability, confined crypto firmly to an investment and trading asset class within Thailand.

Royal Decree on Digital Asset Businesses B.E. 2561 came into force on 14 May 2018 (published in the Royal Gazette 13 May 2018), creating Thailand's first comprehensive crypto legal framework: it defined 'digital assets' (cryptocurrencies and digital tokens), vested the SEC as sole regulator, mandated licensing for exchanges, brokers, dealers, and fund managers, and imposed criminal penalties of 2-5 years imprisonment and fines of THB 200,000-500,000 for unlicensed operation. This decree, and its subsequent amendments, remains the primary statute governing all digital asset activity in Thailand today.