From Speculation to Disclosure: Steering Crypto to Create Value in Southeast Asia

Nearly two decades since Bitcoin’s launch, cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology have produced limited tangible success in Southeast Asia. On the one hand, select blockchains are finally gaining traction through practical applications that leverage their immutable, publicly auditable, and programmable nature. For example, the Philippines announced in January 2026 that it will track its national budget on the Polygon blockchain for transparency and accountability. Singapore’s Project Guardian is building infrastructure for tokenised assets, which will enable financial institutions to decrease the time and cost of settling transactions such as cross-border payments, secondary trading, collateralised borrowing, and asset issuance.

On the other hand, even industry proponents admit that meaningful use cases are still frequently eclipsed by the prevalence of scams and illicit financial flows. In turn, in a market dominated by speculation, investment capital has often flowed toward projects with the most hype rather than those that create the most productive value. This is evidenced in Southeast Asia, where highly touted regional projects such as Terra and Axie Infinity burned regional investors when their business models were exposed as untenable, thus causing their billion dollar valuations to plunge over 95 per cent. The crypto market’s current downturn — not only with Bitcoin but also more widely with the median cryptocurrency declining by 79 per cent last year — further highlights the problem of speculative crypto assets.

Mandatory disclosures provide a key tool to combat the misallocation of capital towards projects that merely sell a story and create hype. Crypto markets are inefficient and characterised by unequal access to information that favours insiders and sophisticated participants. Mandatory disclosures, such as concerning a crypto project’s underlying technology, financials, and conflicts of interest, provide a standardised framework for investors to evaluate crypto projects effectively.   

Countries face two primary hurdles in mandating disclosures. First, the instantaneous and borderless availability of cryptocurrencies through blockchains hinders the ability to enforce disclosures by overseas issuers. Second, mature blockchains such as Bitcoin are decentralised, meaning that there may not exist a single controlling entity to produce disclosures.

Nevertheless, the challenges are surmountable and some Southeast Asian governments have rightly responded by requiring crypto exchanges—the primary on-ramps for crypto investors—to provide mandatory disclosures. In the process, they have chosen either a light approach or a thorough approach, often informed by whether they regulate crypto assets as investment products.

As an example of the light approach, Singapore has general disclosure requirements in line with the fact that the Monetary Authority of Singapore — which has an integrated role as the banking, securities and payments regulator — regulates cryptocurrencies as “digital payment tokens” rather than as investment products. Overall, Singapore discourages the public from investing in cryptocurrencies and bans crypto exchanges from advertising. Nevertheless, retail investors can trade thousands of crypto assets at domestically licensed exchanges. When they purchase these assets, Singapore’s disclosure requirements are broad and exchanges need only to inform traders regarding the general risks from purchasing cryptocurrencies, rather than the risks of individual crypto assets.

In the Philippines and Malaysia, where the securities regulators treat cryptocurrencies as investment products, there are more stringent disclosure rules. Last year, the Philippines began requiring crypto exchanges to file and list detailed disclosures at least 30 days prior to listing any crypto asset. Malaysia, which allows fewer than 25 cryptocurrencies for trading, is drafting new rules to permit crypto exchanges to self-list tokens, conditional on their adhering to disclosures in nine areas outlined by the International Organization of Securities Commission (IOSCO). These disclosures cover ownership and control of a given crypto asset along with its risks.

Since the vast majority of retail users buy cryptocurrencies for investment purposes, the Philippines’ and Malaysia’s approach to treat them as investment products is appropriate. Notably, in the Philippines this investment-focused approach coexists with a framework for the use of crypto assets in banking and payments. Consequently, the Securities and Exchange Commission’s oversight works in tandem with its central bank and the Anti-Money Laundering Council to provide comprehensive coverage across both investment and transactional use cases.

Mandatory disclosures provide a key tool to combat the misallocation of capital towards projects that merely sell a story and create hype.

To further increase transparency for investors, ASEAN countries should require crypto exchanges to provide additional disclosures relating to usage metrics and issuer attestations. Analysis of usage metrics—which are difficult for most retail investors to obtain—should be provided, such as active users, fees collected, and concentration of transactions indicating whether usage is organic or dominated by a few players. These disclosures should not only report current levels but also historical trends covering a period of at least two years.

Furthermore, exchanges should report a core set of attestations by crypto issuers, so that any fraudulent claims can be treated with the same legal gravity as misrepresentations in traditional financial markets. A critical area for such attestations is whether issuers engage in market activities to support the price of their own or related crypto assets. In addition to Terra, many crypto projects have artificially inflated their prices, such as Celsius, FTX, and SafeMoon, among many others. Timely action is needed: Binance’s announcement earlier in 2026 that it would support the price of Bitcoin with over USD1 billion in purchases illustrates how crypto markets do not yet behave as mature markets.

To unlock the full potential of blockchain technology, ASEAN nations should consider harmonising disclosure standards for exchanges. This would both enable investors to effectively evaluate cryptocurrencies and their underlying projects, and allow worthy ventures to access capital across the region without having to navigate a patchwork of disparate regulations. Ultimately, requiring mandatory disclosures is not a panacea, but it will go a long way to building integrity in crypto markets and helping to channel investor funds to the most productive projects.

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