Thailand’s securities regulator has finalized a long-anticipated framework that will require licensed digital-asset businesses to treat cryptocurrency transfers more like traditional wire payments.
Announced on 2 September 2026, the Travel Rule for Digital Assets will take effect on 27 February 2027, giving firms roughly six months to build the systems needed to collect, exchange, and store identifying information on both sides of every transfer.
The rules sit in SEC Notification No. Sor Thor. 9/2026, dated 25 August 2026.
They apply to digital-asset operators supervised by the Securities and Exchange Commission, including platforms that send or receive tokens on behalf of customers.
The goal is straightforward: give operators enough information to assess money-laundering and technology-crime risk and to stop licensed services from being used as anonymous pipes for illicit funds.
Four core duties define the new regime.
First, firms must write and operate risk-management policies covering transfers and receipts.
Second, they must gather data on their own customers and on counterparties, perform due diligence, confirm that the other virtual-asset service provider is properly authorized, check any intermediary used in the routing path, and verify that a customer actually owns or controls a self-hosted wallet whenever assets move to or from one.
Third, the originating operator must attach originator and beneficiary details to the transfer order and send that package to the receiving operator.
Fourth, the accompanying records must be kept for at least five years in a form that supervisors can retrieve quickly.
The requirements cover transfers of every size. Smaller movements still need basic identification of the recipient.
Transfers above 30,000 baht—the local equivalent of the FATF’s roughly 1,000-dollar threshold—trigger extra data such as the recipient’s city or province, country, and, if the recipient is a company, its registration number.
Self-hosted wallets are not banned, but licensed platforms that interact with them must complete ownership or control checks before processing the movement.
The framework is an interim SEC measure developed jointly with the Anti-Money Laundering Office while AMLO prepares longer-term rules under the Anti-Money Laundering Act.
Public hearings on the principles (March–April 2026) and the draft notification (June–July 2026) showed broad industry support.
SEC Secretary-General Pornanong Budsaratragoon said the Travel Rule should make it harder for licensed businesses to be used for money laundering or terrorist financing, raise Thailand’s alignment with FATF standards, and support longer-term links with international markets.
For operators the practical work is substantial: they must build secure channels for transmitting and receiving travel-rule data, add transaction-monitoring tools, and train staff to request extra information from customers.
Non-compliant transfers will not be permitted once the deadline arrives.
For users the change will be most visible when moving coins between a regulated exchange and a private wallet or when sending larger amounts; the blockchain address alone will no longer be sufficient.
The February 2027 start date is designed to give the industry time to prepare without leaving a long gap in oversight. Once live, Thailand’s licensed crypto sector will operate under information-sharing standards that already apply to conventional bank wires in most of the world.