Thai SEC Set To Explore More Open ICO Regulations

The Thai Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) are alleged to be altering their approach to the facilitation of Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) within Thailand. This is based on reports that suggest the SEC are running a public hearing to further explore the culture of ICOs in order to develop new regulations that make ICOs safer, instead of just banning them all together.

According to Bitcoin.com, the Thai SEC have made the following announcement in the Bangkok Post:

“The Thai Securities and Exchange Commission is conducting a public hearing to relax regulations on pre-sales and private sales of initial coin offerings, aiming to reduce impediments for ICO issuers raising funds.”

In May 2018, the Thai government gave legislative rights to the Thai SEC with regards to cryptocurrencies and ICOs. Once this happened, the SEC also became responsible for moderating and issuing regulations to cryptocurrency exchanges, investors, brokers and dealers in Thailand, though they never made it very clear where they stand with regards to ICOs.

This latest news comes as no surprise since last week, Praoporn Senanarong, the Assistant Secretary General at the SEC stated that:

“The Thai government is in the process of considering the appropriate regulatory framework. ICO funding must be done through an ICO portal approved by the SEC to help screen ICOs and increase transparency.”

Now, the public hearing will go live until the end of january 2019.

The ICO ‘portal’ will involve a set of rules and regulations that mean ICOs will be closely monitored to ensure that they are legal and safe for investors, this is also an approach that has been taken to ensure that the risk of fraud is reduced. According to Coindesk, a cut out from the Bangkok Post, reporting on the ICO portal reads as following:

“To prevent exploiting investment opportunities during public ICOs, the SEC plans to require all ICO issuers to distribute all digital tokens to every investor group at the same time after public ICOs end. Digital tokens receiving a discount or bonus will have a lock-up period of six months starting from the first day of digital token distribution.”

For now, we will have to wait until the end of January 2019 in order to understand the full scale of these new regulations.