Soda Labs

Taiwan

The travel rule that has never come into force

JurisdictionAsia-PacificRegime still forming

No settled rule on confidentiality yet; the framework is in draft or newly in force.

What Taiwan actually says

Two things commonly reported about Taiwan are wrong. The VASP Act is not pending; it passed its third reading on 30 June 2026, though commencement still has to be designated and licensing runs on a 21-month tail after that. And the travel rule, often described as operative with an NT$30,000 threshold, has never been in force at all. The provision has carried a deferred effective date since 2021, and the regulator confirmed in writing in August 2026 that it has still not been implemented, setting out a phased plan starting with domestic transfers in October 2026. There is no named privacy-coin prohibition. For now Taiwan is the outlier: a registration regime in force, and the transfer-identity machinery still switched off.

The instruments that matter

VASP Act passed third reading 30 June 2026, promulgated 22 July 2026
56 articles defining seven service categories and requiring central bank consent plus FSC permission for stablecoin issuance; commencement is delegated to the Executive Yuan and has not been set, after which firms have 12 months to apply and 21 to be licensed
Travel rule not implemented
the FSC confirmed in writing on 4 August 2026 that the mechanism has to date not been implemented, five years after the provision was made
Phased plan announced
domestic VASP-to-VASP from October 2026, cross-border from end-2027, applying to transfers of any value with NT$30,000 as an enhanced-data trigger
Mandatory registration from 30 November 2024
under the Money Laundering Control Act; nine firms had registered as at 22 September 2025
No functioning data protection authority
Constitutional Court judgment 111-憲判-13 of 12 August 2022 gave three years to build an independent supervisory mechanism; that deadline lapsed unmet in August 2025
PDPA Article 1-1 has never commenced
it designates a Personal Data Protection Commission as competent authority, but the Executive Yuan has not set a commencement date and the body remains a preparatory office

What this means for confidential transactions

Bubble is built for exactly this shape of obligation: amounts and balances live on chain as ciphertexts, computation happens without decryption, and the only disclosure path is an on-chain access list through which an authorized party - an auditor, a supervisor, a counterparty - can request scoped decryption. That is confidentiality from the public, not from the regulator.

Compliant by default.

See how selective disclosure satisfies a supervisor without publishing your book to the world.