Crypto Exchanges Become Reporting Entities: Luật số 23/2026/QH16 Pulls Tài Sản Mã Hóa Into Việt Nam's Anti-Money-Laundering Regime

Việt Nam spent 2025 and 2026 giving crypto assets a legal existence: recognition in the Luật Công nghiệp công nghệ số, a five-year pilot market under Nghị quyết 05/2025/NQ-CP, and a schedule of fines that took effect on 1 September. The one thing the framework still lacked was the obligation that defines a regulated financial business anywhere else in the world — the duty to know your customer and report the transactions that look wrong. Luật số 23/2026/QH16 supplies it.

What the document is

Luật số 23/2026/QH16 is a Luật sửa đổi, bổ sung một số điều của Luật Ngân hàng Nhà nước Việt Nam, Luật Phòng, chống rửa tiền và Luật Các tổ chức tín dụng — one act amending three laws. The National Assembly of the 16th legislature passed it on the afternoon of 24 August 2026 at its Kỳ họp không thường lệ thứ Nhất (first extraordinary session), with 473 of the 476 deputies present voting in favour — 94.6%. The President signed the promulgation order (Lệnh công bố) on 26 August 2026, and the Văn phòng Chủ tịch nước presented the law publicly at the press conference of 10 September 2026 that announced 15 laws from that session. It takes effect on 1 December 2026.

The text is short — 4 articles — because it is an amending instrument. Article by article it edits three parents: the Luật Ngân hàng Nhà nước Việt Nam số 46/2010/QH12, the Luật Phòng, chống rửa tiền số 14/2022/QH15 (passed 15 November 2022, in force since 1 March 2023, 4 chapters and 66 articles), and the Luật Các tổ chức tín dụng số 32/2024/QH15. At the press conference it was presented by Đoàn Thái Sơn, Phó Thống đốc Thường trực of the Ngân hàng Nhà nước, which drafted it.

The State Bank gave four reasons for the law: to settle questions created by the 2025 restructuring of the state apparatus, which carry a deadline of 1 March 2027; to close gaps in anti-money-laundering law identified by FATF, APG and the OECD; to fix difficulties in the State Bank’s own financial mechanism; and to let the State Bank discharge its obligations as a member of the International Monetary Fund.

Why now: the grey list

The driver behind the AML half of the law is external. Việt Nam was placed on the FATF’s list of Jurisdictions under Increased Monitoring — the “grey list” — in June 2023, with an action plan of 17 items to complete. Progress has been slow: as of the September 2024 review reported by Vietnam News, 16 of the 17 actions were marked “not completed” and one “partially completed”, and the APG warned that FATF was considering moving Việt Nam to the black list of High-Risk Jurisdictions subject to a Call for Action. Việt Nam remained on the grey list at the June 2026 FATF plenary.

One of the commitments Việt Nam made was to build a legal framework that either prohibits or regulates virtual assets and virtual-asset service providers — in FATF’s own numbering, Recommendation 15. Until now, Việt Nam had done the first half of that (recognising crypto assets and licensing a pilot market) without the second (subjecting the providers to AML duties). Luật số 23/2026/QH16 is the instrument that closes the loop, and the timing — a law rushed through an extraordinary session in August — reflects how much is riding on the next FATF review. The State Bank has publicly linked grey-list status to lower foreign investment, costlier external borrowing and greater caution from foreign counterparties.

What changes for crypto assets

Under the 2022 law, đối tượng báo cáo (reporting entities) fell into two groups: financial institutions, and designated non-financial businesses and professions — prize-winning games and casinos, real-estate trading other than leasing, dealing in precious metals and stones, legal and accounting services, company-formation and management services, and some online gaming. Crypto-asset businesses appeared nowhere on that list, for the simple reason that when the law was drafted they had no recognised legal existence.

Luật số 23/2026/QH16 adds crypto-asset service providers to the reporting entities. The consequence is that the standard machinery of the 2022 law now applies to them: customer identification and verification, retention of records, and the duty to file a suspicious transaction report to the Ngân hàng Nhà nước whenever there are reasonable grounds to suspect that assets involved in a transaction derive from criminal activity. Obligations are to be applied proportionately to each entity’s scale and risk level.

The law also writes 15 suspicious-transaction indicators specific to crypto assets into the statute — the crypto equivalent of the sector-specific indicator lists the 2022 law already contains for banking, insurance and securities. Reported examples include:

splitting a crypto-asset transaction into several smaller transactions to stay under reporting thresholds;
multiple high-value crypto transactions in a short period with no clear economic or business purpose;
converting crypto assets into many different types without a rational investment or business rationale.

Supervision is divided. The Bộ Tài chính takes responsibility for anti-money-laundering inspection and supervision in the crypto-asset and securities sectors — consistent with its role as the licensing authority for the pilot crypto market under Nghị quyết 05/2025/NQ-CP. The Thanh tra Chính phủ covers reporting entities in sectors that sit under no line ministry, and the Ngân hàng Nhà nước retains its central AML role. The law states that supervision follows risk-based principles.

The other AML changes

Two further amendments matter beyond crypto. The definition of chủ sở hữu hưởng lợi (beneficial owner) is rewritten so that it captures the range of situations in which a person actually owns or controls a customer, with the Government to align the concept with the criteria used in enterprise legislation — a long-standing FATF criticism of the Vietnamese regime. And the law strengthens customer identification, verification and record-keeping standards, while adding liability protection for reporting entities that file suspicious transaction reports in good faith — a safe-harbour provision that removes a practical disincentive to reporting.

Note what the law does not change: the large-value transaction reporting threshold set by Quyết định 11/2023/QĐ-TTg — 400 million đồng, in force since 1 December 2023 — is a Prime Ministerial decision, not statute, and can be adjusted separately.

What changes in banking law

The five groups of amendments to the Luật Ngân hàng Nhà nước are technical but consequential:

International investment position. New provisions on Việt Nam’s trạng thái đầu tư quốc tế, giving the State Bank the legal basis to compile and report the data its IMF membership requires.
Foreign exchange. Restrictions on the use of foreign currency within Vietnamese territory, except in cases permitted by law or by the Governor.
Financial mechanism. Authority to regulate the State Bank’s financial arrangements moves from the Prime Minister to the Government, aligning with the Luật Tổ chức Chính phủ.
Risk-based prudential ratios. The State Bank may apply different safety ratios to individual credit institutions in specified cases supporting socio-economic development, provided the institution adopts a roadmap back to compliance.
Organisational alignment. Adjustments for the two-tier local government model, and removal of the Bộ Tài chính’s inspection role over the management of the state foreign exchange reserves.

The Luật Các tổ chức tín dụng gets a single edit, to khoản 2 Điều 114: commercial banks may act as đại lý quản lý tài sản bảo đảm — collateral management agent — for corporate bond issues. This fills a gap that has forced awkward workarounds in Vietnamese bond deals, though full implementation still depends on complementary securities regulation.

Who is affected

Licensed crypto-asset service providers are the obvious group. The five applicants whose dossiers the Bộ Tài chính was assessing as of late August 2026 should assume that an AML compliance function — officer, internal policy, transaction monitoring, record retention, STR workflow — is now part of the operating baseline, not a later refinement. A platform going live in, say, Q4 2026 would have weeks, not months, before the duties bite on 1 December.

Foreign exchanges serving Vietnamese users face a compounding picture: unlicensed service provision has been sanctionable since Nghị định 284/2026/NĐ-CP took effect on 1 September, and from 1 December the licensed alternative carries full financial-institution-grade AML obligations. Neither route is light-touch.

Banks and existing reporting entities get modest changes — the new beneficial-owner test will require re-papering some corporate customer files, and the safe harbour should make compliance teams more willing to file.

Individual crypto investors will notice the practical effect: on a licensed Vietnamese platform, identity verification and transaction monitoring become unavoidable, and patterns such as structuring transfers below thresholds will be flagged by design.

Open questions

The law is a framework; the detail is not yet public. It is not stated which specific businesses count as crypto-asset service providers for reporting purposes — whether the category tracks exactly the licensed pilot-market providers, or extends to custodians, wallet software and intermediaries outside the pilot. The 15 suspicious indicators will need threshold values and typologies to be operable, presumably in a Government decree or a State Bank circular; none has been issued. Nor is it clear how the Bộ Tài chính’s new supervisory duty interacts with the Ngân hàng Nhà nước’s existing AML infrastructure, or whether a large-value reporting threshold analogous to the 400 million đồng cash rule will be set for crypto. With under three months to the effective date, those instruments are the thing to watch.

Sources

This post is general information, not legal advice.