Thailand’s financial regulators are set to tighten rules on new cryptocurrency accounts, with an updated KYC (know-your-customer) policy that will require customers to be physically present for verification purposes.
In a recent report, the Bangkok Post said Thailand’s Anti-Money Laundering Office (Amlo) has directed domestic digital currency exchanges to require submission to “dip-chip” machine verification for new accounts. This means customers will need to be physically present for verification. Satang Corp director and co-founder Poramin Insom said the dip-chip requirement will take effect in September.
Poramin commented on the new rule, “Most digital asset exchanges are still busy preparing their systems to accommodate the growing number of clients as new account applications continue to flow in. However, this growth may be curbed if the application process becomes more complicated,” the outlet reports.
The newly announced restrictions arrive as Thailand experiences a surge in cryptocurrency account creation. Data show that as of late April, 697,780 cryptocurrency accounts were recorded, a considerable jump from 160,000 at the of end 2020.
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In a related development, cryptocurrency trading is experiencing a renaissance in Thailand, with retail traders keen to register, after the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) allowed leading Thai exchange Bitkub to resume acceptance of new accounts.
The exchange was ordered by the SEC in February to stop accepting new registrations after recording at least three outages in January, coinciding with periods in which many digital currencies were experiencing an uptick in value.
A separate report by the Bangkok Post said that Bitkub has accumulated more than one million trading account applicants since the exchange’s inception in February 2018. The highest volume trading pair at time of publication on Bitkub is DOGE/THB.
