Thailand Proposes a 5 Million Baht Daily Stablecoin Transfer Cap

Thailand's securities regulator wants to cap how much stablecoin a customer can move through a regulated venue in a day. The Securities and Exchange Commission opened comment on Thursday on a draft notification covering stablecoin transactions made through licensed operators. Inbound and outbound transfers would each be limited to 5 million baht per customer per day at each operator, and both ends would have to be verified as belonging to the same person. Comments close on 26 November.

Two caps, not one

The baht figure is the one to hold. Converting it is where the accounts part company. The Block, filing at 10:15 UTC on Friday, put 5 million baht at approximately $147,750; Cointelegraph had $148,000. Neither states the rate it used, and the baht number is identical in both and in the regulator's own release.

The shape of the limit reads two ways. The Block has it as 5 million baht per operator, in either direction, per day, which sounds like one allowance split between deposits and withdrawals. The SEC's release limits the inbound and outbound values separately, and crypto.news read it the same way. We take the regulator's text: the full amount could go in and the full amount out at one venue on the same day.

The same name at both ends

The ownership test has the longer reach. The account or wallet sending stablecoins in, and the one receiving a withdrawal, must both be verified as the customer's own. Sending to someone else's wallet through a regulated venue, or receiving from one, would be prohibited outright. Operators would also have to meet the Travel Rule, the requirement that firms collect and pass on information about who is behind a transfer, and run blockchain analytics to check whether assets touch high-risk or watchlisted wallets.

"The value of stablecoins transferred into and out of a customer's account must be commensurate with the customer's source of income and financial position," the SEC said.

The Block reports that the draft leaves pure peer-to-peer on-chain transfers untouched. The release itself does not say that. It sets rules for transfers made through operators and is silent on what happens off them.

What the ceiling does not touch

Four categories sit outside the 5-million-baht limit, and the release names them:

• operators moving stablecoins through accounts in their own names for business purposes;
• firms supervised by the Bank of Thailand that have its approval to use stablecoins under a specified model;
• market makers in stablecoin and baht pairs, including transfers they make through supervised operators;
• subscriptions and refunds for digital token offerings the SEC has approved, along with repayments of invested capital and returns.

A fifth carve-out is conditional. Moving stablecoins between a customer's own accounts at two SEC-supervised operators is exempt, but only where both comply with the Travel Rule. The Block's account leaves that condition out.

Who has to be named

The rest of the draft is about who stands behind a trade. Exchanges would have to publish the names of their market makers and the assets each provides liquidity for. Brokers would be barred from using liquidity providers in stablecoin and baht pairs, and any provider used elsewhere would have to sit in a jurisdiction applying the Financial Action Task Force's recommendations. Off-platform trades would carry a minimum size of 3 million baht, which The Block alone converts to $88,528.

Two weeks on the clock

The draft follows a public hearing the SEC ran in September, and the regulator says the comments from that round shaped the text. Thailand has been building its rulebook at pace: in October it opened its exchange to spot bitcoin and ether funds. The direction here is different. This is plumbing for anti-money-laundering supervision, and it lands on the same operators.

Regulators elsewhere in the region have come at the problem from the other side. Korea's Financial Services Commission gave exchanges room to freeze withdrawals on a suspected hack, where Thailand sets a number and leaves operators to police it. Nothing in the release fixes a date for the rules to take effect. Nor has the SEC published any estimate of how many customers move more than 5 million baht in a day now.

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