Soda Labs

APG

How the global standards actually reach Asia

Regulator or standard-setterAsia-PacificAttribution required

A regulated firm must be able to attribute activity to an identified person, and assets or accounts that make that impossible are barred at the licensed perimeter. This is a rule about attribution, not about whether amounts are public.

What APG actually says

Standards do not travel by themselves, and this is the machinery that moves them across Asia. The regional body assesses its 41 members against the FATF Recommendations, and it is those assessments, rather than any direct FATF instruction, that turn the travel rule and the virtual asset provider regime into domestic law across the region. Read the jurisdiction entries for Asia in this section and the common shape is visible: the same obligations, arriving at different speeds, in the order that evaluations fell. The fifth global round began in 2024, so the next set of national rules is being shaped through it now.

The instruments that matter

The largest FATF-style regional body
41 member jurisdictions, the biggest of the regional groups both by membership and by the size of the region it covers
Mutual evaluation is the mechanism
it assesses members against the FATF Recommendations and the 2022 methodology, which is how the travel rule becomes a domestic obligation across the region
The global fifth round began in 2024
run jointly by FATF and the regional bodies, so the next wave of national crypto rules across Asia is being shaped through these assessments now

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.