Taiwan
ABMedia
FSC opens deposit-token pilot program for banks; Taishin Bank has made inquiries but has not yet formally applied
- Applicant banks must address five items in their business plan: pilot scope and use cases; token issuance, transfer, redemption and destruction procedures compared with existing deposit/remittance operations; reconciliation and control mechanisms between deposit accounts and token ledgers; the technical architecture (e.g., distributed ledger or blockchain, nodes, wallets, smart contracts) and security controls; and redemption, destruction and customer-protection arrangements when the pilot ends.
- Banking Bureau Director-General Tung Cheng-chang emphasized that deposit tokens remain legally deposits — subject to deposit insurance and reserve requirements — unlike stablecoins, which are virtual assets whose price stability relies on linked reserve assets; the FSC currently envisions the pilots mainly in New Taiwan Dollars, with foreign-currency (e.g., USD) use for trade finance still to be coordinated with the central bank.
- Taishin Bank is seen as the likely first applicant after raising the concept via a regulatory consultation session; Tung noted settlement could be either purely intra-bank (simplest, no need for Financial Information Service Co. involvement) or cross-bank (requiring the Financial Information Service Co.), and that likely pilot use cases include trade finance (import/export, letters of credit, negotiation) and on-chain virtual asset investment, given customers' existing familiarity with those on-chain services.