Stellar Lumens and Vietnam's new crypto rules

Crypto is not banned in Vietnam, but it is in the middle of a big legal shift. Since 1 January 2026 digital assets have a place in Vietnamese statute, a five-year pilot allows licensed domestic exchanges to trade crypto in dong, and a 0.1% tax applies to each transfer. What does not exist yet is a licensed exchange: at our latest check, applicants were still going through approval. So when Vietnamese users buy Stellar Lumens (XLM) today, they do it on offshore platforms and P2P markets that Vietnamese authorities have not licensed.

The live XLM/VND widget above converts the global price into dong. If you searched “giá XLM”, that is what you are looking at: giá means price, and “giá XLM hôm nay” is simply today’s XLM price. Because there is no licensed XLM/VND order book, every dong quote you see online is a conversion of the dollar price, not a local market.

Is crypto legal in Vietnam? From grey zone to statute

For years the honest answer was “not illegal to hold, not legal to pay with, and not regulated in between”. Vietnamese traders used global exchanges, and the State Bank of Vietnam (SBV) repeated that crypto is not money. That grey zone is now being filled with law, one instrument at a time.

The foundation is the Law on Digital Technology Industry, No. 71/2025/QH15, passed on 14 June 2025 and effective from 1 January 2026. It is the first law to bring tài sản số (digital assets), including crypto-assets, into Vietnamese statute. The working rules for trading come from the government’s pilot resolution and the Ministry of Finance.

What Resolution 05 asks of a licensed exchange

Resolution 05/2025/NQ-CP defines a crypto-asset (tài sản mã hóa) as a digital asset that uses cryptography, and explicitly excludes securities and digital forms of fiat money. All offering, issuance, trading and payment within the pilot must be in VND. The bar for running an exchange is deliberately high: at least VND10,000 billion (about US$380 million) of paid-in charter capital, at least 65% held by institutions with more than 35% from at least two banks, securities firms, fund managers, insurers or tech companies, foreign ownership capped at 49%, and level-4 information-system security. Each investor may back only one licensed provider. In short, this is a regime for bank-backed consortia, not start-ups, and foreign exchanges cannot be licensed in their own name.

The race for Vietnam’s first licensed crypto exchange

The Ministry of Finance began accepting applications on 20 January 2026 under Decision 96/QĐ-BTC. Seven applications were filed, and five passed the initial review: VIXEX, CAEX (in the VPBank ecosystem), TCEX (Techcom), SCEX and Moonbase. In its most recent update, CAEX said it had passed the level-4 security appraisal and met the capital requirement, but still had to finish its technology and operating processes. As of that report, no exchange had been licensed (Thanh Niên).

Global players can only come in as minority shareholders, and some already have: OKX Ventures and HashKey Capital took stakes in CAEX. Our Vietnam exchange guide tracks each applicant’s status and the offshore platforms Vietnamese users rely on in the meantime.

The licence also starts a clock. Decree 284/2026/NĐ-CP on administrative penalties took effect on 1 September 2026. It sets fines of VND30–50 million for domestic investors trading through unlicensed providers, up to VND200 million for organisations, and VND180–200 million for running an unlicensed market (Dân trí). Under the pilot, however, sanctions on users who trade outside licensed providers apply only six months after the first licence is granted. With no licence issued at our latest check, that window has not opened yet. An SSC official has said investors need not move coins out of personal wallets, but once the rules bite, any transaction is expected to go through a licensed domestic provider.

Pan-chan says

The day Vietnam grants its first exchange licence is the date to note. Six months later, trading XLM on an offshore sàn could expose you to fines, so plan your route before then.

Crypto payments are still banned by the State Bank

None of this makes crypto money. The SBV’s long-standing position is that Bitcoin and similar virtual currencies are not a legal means of payment, and credit institutions may not use them (VnEconomy; SBV). Paying with an illegal means of payment has been sanctionable since 2018. The pilot covers investment trading in dong on licensed venues and nothing more. A café in District 1 accepting XLM for a cà phê sữa đá would be breaking the rules, however modern it feels.

Crypto tax in Vietnam: 0.1% of every transfer

The amended Personal Income Tax Law, passed on 10 December 2025 and effective 1 July 2026, adds income from transferring digital assets as a taxable category at 0.1% of each transfer’s value. It is levied on the gross amount, not on profit, so a losing trade is taxed just like a winning one (Thị trường Tài chính Tiền tệ). Sell VND100 million of XLM and VND100,000 is due. Foreign institutional investors pay 0.1% corporate income tax on transfer revenue, collected through the service provider. Circular 32/2026/TT-BTC, issued in March 2026, guides how VAT, corporate and personal income tax apply to crypto transactions.

The rule is clear on licensed venues, where the provider withholds the tax. How it is collected for trades on offshore platforms is far less clear in practice, which is one more reason the government wants activity moved onshore. If you are unsure about your own position, ask a Vietnamese tax adviser rather than a Telegram group.

XLM VND: how Vietnamese users access Stellar today

With no licensed exchange, Vietnamese demand for XLM flows through two channels. The first is offshore exchanges. VietnamNet has described Binance as the most popular international exchange in Vietnam, and others such as OKX, Bybit, Bitget, MEXC, Gate, BingX and KuCoin are also used. All of them list XLM, mostly against USDT. None is licensed by Vietnamese authorities, and foreign firms cannot be.

The second is P2P. Because no exchange has a dong order book, VND usually enters crypto through peer-to-peer markets where a user buys USDT from a merchant by bank transfer, often by scanning a VietQR code, and then trades USDT for XLM. Binance P2P showed live USDT/VND offers at our latest check. P2P works, but it is where most of the risk sits: merchants’ bank accounts can be frozen if funds are linked to fraud, and buyers can get caught up in disputes they did not start.

We present this as a description of the market, not a recommendation. Using unlicensed platforms is a legal grey area today and will carry fines once the transition period begins. For a neutral explanation of buying XLM in general, see our guide to buying Stellar Lumens, and check the live XLM price before trusting a P2P quote.

Remittances to Vietnam and the honest role of Stellar

Vietnam is one of Asia’s big remittance destinations. Government officials said 2025 inflows set a record above US$16 billion, with Ho Chi Minh City alone receiving roughly US$10.5 billion (Hanoi Times). The World Bank’s indicator series has no Vietnam data for recent years, so the government figure is the one to use. Picture a factory worker in Korea sending won home to family in Nghệ An every month, paying fees and FX spreads at both ends.

Stellar was designed for exactly that kind of transfer. Ledgers close in about five seconds, fees are a tiny fraction of a cent, and anchors turn stablecoins such as USDC back into local cash. Our cross-border payments explainer walks through the mechanics, and the guide to Stellar anchors explains the on- and off-ramps.

In Vietnam the pieces do not connect yet. We found no Vietnam-specific Stellar anchor, no dong token on Stellar and no SDF partnership in the country. MoneyGram, a Stellar partner since 2021, does pay out in Vietnam, but through its traditional network; we found no evidence of a Stellar or USDC payout corridor. SDF has said it plans anchor networks in Vietnam, Indonesia and the Philippines, and that remains a plan. The law also matters: Resolution 05 requires VND settlement and excludes digital forms of fiat money from its definition of crypto-assets, so how a dollar stablecoin or a Stellar anchor would fit is genuinely unclear. Anyone claiming you can already “send money home to Vietnam over Stellar” legally and at scale is ahead of the facts.

Vietnam in the Chainalysis adoption index

Vietnam is usually described as a crypto-heavy country, and the data backs that up, with a caveat. In the 2025 Chainalysis Global Crypto Adoption Index, Vietnam ranked #4. In the 2026 edition, published with a new methodology based on total flows, balances, P2P activity and cross-border flows, it ranked #18. Because the formula changed, the two numbers are not a trend, and “Vietnam fell 14 places” would be a misreading.

What you will not find is an official count of Vietnamese crypto users. Figures such as “17 million” or “21 million” circulate widely in local media, but none comes from a government source, so treat them as estimates. There is also no local data on how much XLM Vietnamese users trade, because no VND order book exists to measure. Indonesia, by contrast, publishes monthly regulator data; see our Stellar Lumens Indonesia guide for a comparison.

Staying safe, and the words you will see

Until licensed exchanges open, Vietnamese XLM holders carry more counterparty risk than buyers in Korea or Japan. A few habits reduce it:

• Prefer a self-custody Stellar wallet for long-term holdings, and never share your seed phrase.
• When sending XLM to any exchange, copy the memo exactly; a missing memo can delay or lose the deposit.
• In P2P trades, never release coins or pay outside the platform’s escrow, and be wary of unusually good rates.
• Ignore “investment groups” promising fixed returns; they are the classic route to losing money.

On the vocabulary side, tiền ảo (virtual money) is the most common everyday term, tiền mã hóa (cryptocurrency) and tiền điện tử (electronic or digital money) are close behind, while officials use tài sản mã hóa and the new law uses tài sản số. A sàn is an exchange, as in “sàn Binance”, and a ví is a wallet. Stellar keeps its English name, often written as “đồng XLM”. For a broader view of risks and how regulators treat Stellar, read our XLM regulation and safety guide or head back to the Asia hub.

Ryu says

If a P2P merchant asks you to “confirm” a payment by sending a second transfer or moving the chat to Zalo, stop. Legitimate trades stay inside the platform’s escrow.

Nothing on this page is legal or investment advice. XLM is volatile, and Vietnam’s rules are still being written.

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