Global Tokenization Policy: How 25 Countries Are Shaping Digital Asset Law

The fundamental questions are the same everywhere: What is a crypto asset, legally? Who regulates it? What must an issuer disclose? What protections do holders enjoy? How does it interact with existing property, securities, and payments law? Twenty-five jurisdictions have now produced statutory answers. The answers diverge sharply — and the divergence is the point. Understanding why jurisdictions chose differently, and what political and institutional forces drove those choices, is the core analytical task of tokenization policy.

The Legislative Race: What Is at Stake

The competition to become the dominant jurisdiction for tokenized finance is not merely symbolic. It determines where treasury operations, asset issuance platforms, and market infrastructure locate. It shapes which legal systems develop deep precedent in novel areas of digital asset law. It influences the international standards that multilateral bodies eventually codify. When the G20 looks for a model to harmonise around, it looks first at the major economies that got there first.

Two legislative moments in 2025 defined the current era. The United States signed the GENIUS Act into law on July 18 — the first federal stablecoin statute in American history, passed 68–30 in the Senate and 308–122 in the House. The European Union’s Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation entered full force on December 30, 2024, having been enacted in June 2023. These two frameworks now set the de facto parameters for how institutional digital asset activity is structured globally.

United States: Federal Law, At Last

The US approach to crypto legislation was, for most of the 2010s, an exercise in regulatory improvisation. The SEC applied the Howey Test to determine when tokens were securities. The CFTC asserted jurisdiction over Bitcoin and Ether as commodities. FinCEN treated exchanges as money services businesses for AML purposes. No statute specifically addressed digital assets at the federal level.

The Financial Innovation and Technology for the 21st Century Act — FIT21 — passed the House in May 2024 with a 279–136 vote. It proposed a comprehensive framework for assigning SEC or CFTC jurisdiction based on the decentralisation status of a digital asset. But the Senate did not act before the election.

The 2024 election changed the congressional composition decisively. The Fairshake PAC, which raised $202.9 million — the largest crypto super PAC in history — achieved a 91% win rate across targeted races, producing a Congress with more than 300 declared pro-digital-asset members. The GENIUS Act followed within months.

The GENIUS Act established federal licensing requirements for stablecoin issuers, mandated one-to-one reserve backing in high-quality liquid assets, created a federal pathway alongside state options, and imposed consumer protection and AML requirements. It resolved the immediate stablecoin problem without resolving the deeper market structure question.

That question — how to determine when a digital asset is a security versus a commodity — is the subject of the CLARITY Act, the successor to FIT21. The CLARITY Act passed the House on July 17, 2025 (294–134) and is pending Senate action. SEC Chair Paul Atkins, confirmed in 2025 and a long-standing proponent of clearer crypto rules, launched “Project Crypto” in July 2025 to systematically revisit the enforcement posture inherited from his predecessor. The SEC/CFTC jurisdiction debate is not yet resolved at the statutory level, but the enforcement-first era that produced dozens of crypto-industry lawsuits is over.

European Union: MiCA as Global Benchmark

MiCA was proposed by the European Commission in September 2020, in the immediate aftermath of Facebook’s abandoned Libra project. The proposal alarmed European regulators on two fronts: first, that a private entity with two billion users might issue a currency-like instrument without a banking licence; second, that European consumers were already exposed to an unregulated digital asset market generating significant losses.

The Commission’s proposal drew on existing financial services law — MiFID II, the E-Money Directive, the Prospectus Regulation — while creating entirely new categories for assets that did not fit existing instruments. The negotiations through the European Parliament and Council took nearly three years, covering the treatment of stablecoins (a major point of contention, given French and German concerns about monetary sovereignty), the scope of the DeFi and NFT exclusions, and the Level 2 technical standards that ESMA would be required to develop.

MiCA entered full force on December 30, 2024. Its core requirements are now operative across all 27 EU member states. Crypto asset service providers — CASPs — must hold an authorisation granted by a national competent authority, which then passports across the single market. Issuers of asset-referenced tokens and e-money tokens face capital requirements, reserve obligations, and transaction volume limits designed to prevent systemic risk from large stablecoin issuers. White paper requirements apply to all public crypto asset offerings.

More than 40 CASP licences have been granted under the MiCA regime. ESMA Chair Verena Ross has indicated that the Level 2 technical standards process will continue through 2025, refining implementation across areas including market abuse, conflict of interest rules, and disclosure formats.

MiCA’s global influence is already visible. US legislators explicitly referenced it in GENIUS Act debates. The UK FCA has used MiCA’s framework as a benchmark in its own consultation documents. Singapore’s MAS has drawn on MiCA’s stablecoin reserve requirements in its own PSA amendments.

United Kingdom: Principles-Based and Post-Brexit

The UK’s approach reflects its institutional character: principles-based, flexible, and oriented toward preserving London’s financial centre status. Post-Brexit, the UK lost automatic passporting rights into the EU single market, creating both a constraint and an opportunity: the opportunity to build a bespoke regulatory framework without the need to align with EU law.

The Financial Services and Markets Act 2023 extended the existing FSMA regulatory perimeter to encompass digital settlement assets (stablecoins) and, through subsequent secondary legislation, a broader range of cryptoasset activities. The full rule set goes live on October 25, 2027. FCA CEO Nikhil Rathi has described the approach as building a “safe harbour for legitimate crypto activity” while maintaining robust consumer protection.

The Bank of England, under Governor Andrew Bailey — who took over as FSB Chair from July 2025 — is separately consulting on the “digital pound,” a potential retail CBDC. The Prudential Regulation Authority has issued guidance on banks’ exposures to cryptoassets aligned with the Basel Committee’s framework. The UK’s regulatory architecture thus spans three institutions (HM Treasury, FCA, Bank of England/PRA) coordinating through a crypto taskforce arrangement.

Switzerland: The First Mover

Switzerland enacted the DLT Act in stages from 2021, making it among the first major financial jurisdictions to specifically accommodate distributed ledger technology within its civil and commercial law. The Act’s key innovations were the creation of “uncertificated register securities” — allowing tokenized securities to be issued and transferred on a DLT system with full legal effect — and the establishment of a new bankruptcy privilege for customers of DLT trading facilities.

FINMA’s technology-neutral approach to categorising tokens (payment tokens, utility tokens, asset tokens, and hybrids) preceded the DLT Act and continues to guide its application. Zug’s Crypto Valley cluster has attracted more than 1,000 blockchain-related entities. For serious protocol foundations and tokenised asset issuers seeking legal certainty over asset structure, Switzerland remains the default European domicile outside the EU regulatory perimeter.

Singapore: Sophisticated and Selective

Singapore’s PSA framework combines comprehensiveness with selectivity. The Monetary Authority of Singapore will not generally issue Digital Token Service Provider licences to firms primarily serving offshore customers — a position that directly limits Singapore’s attractiveness as a regulatory arbitrage jurisdiction while preserving its credibility with the Financial Action Task Force.

The PSA stablecoin regime requires issuers of single-currency stablecoins above SGD 5 million in circulation to maintain full reserve backing, redeem at par within five business days, and hold capital of at least SGD 1 million. These requirements sit alongside a broader licensing framework covering digital payment token services, cross-border transfers, and account issuance.

Hong Kong: ASPIRe and the Return

Hong Kong’s 2022 announcement that it would welcome regulated crypto activity reversed years of increasingly restrictive posture. The SFC’s Virtual Asset Trading Platform licensing regime has now produced seven active VATP licences. The ASPIRe Roadmap, published in February 2025, outlines a five-pillar approach to developing Hong Kong as a leading digital asset hub: Access, Safeguarding, Infrastructure, Products, and Relationships.

The Hong Kong Stablecoin Ordinance, effective August 1, 2025, requires licensing for stablecoin issuers operating in Hong Kong or issuing Hong Kong dollar-denominated stablecoins. SFC CEO Julia Leung has described the framework as designed to attract serious institutional participants while deterring regulatory arbitrage. Hong Kong and Singapore are now in open competition for institutional crypto domicile, each offering distinct advantages: Hong Kong’s proximity to mainland Chinese capital and its common law system; Singapore’s ASEAN connectivity and MAS’s deep expertise in fintech supervision.

UAE: Speed and Substance

The UAE has moved faster than almost any other jurisdiction to build a comprehensive and operationally functional crypto regulatory infrastructure. VARA in Dubai, the ADGM Financial Services Regulatory Authority in Abu Dhabi, and the DFSA in the DIFC offer three distinct regulatory pathways for firms seeking a UAE presence.

VARA is now fully operational, with dozens of active licences across exchange, advisory, broker-dealer, and custody categories. Crypto.com received a derivatives licence from VARA in March 2025. The UAE has positioned itself as the bridge jurisdiction for institutional digital asset activity between East and West — a role reinforced by its time zone positioning and its status as a neutral jurisdiction in the geopolitical competition between US and Chinese financial systems.

Japan: Institutional Depth

Japan has the longest regulatory tradition of any major crypto jurisdiction, with exchange licensing requirements in place since 2017. The Financial Services Agency has enacted successive rounds of reform, most recently strengthening customer asset segregation requirements following the FTX collapse. Japan’s stablecoin law, effective from 2023, restricts issuance to licensed banks, trust companies, and registered money transfer agents — a more conservative approach than most jurisdictions, reflecting Japan’s existing financial stability concerns.

The FSA and LDP’s web3 policy office have actively sought to attract tokenisation infrastructure, particularly in the areas of security token offerings and real-world asset tokenisation. Japan’s legal framework for security tokens under the Financial Instruments and Exchange Act is among the most developed in Asia.

The International Coordination Layer

No national legislature writes crypto law in isolation. The FSB’s October 2025 peer review identified eight recommendations and significant gaps in G20 members’ implementation of the 2023 FSB crypto framework. OECD’s Crypto-Asset Reporting Framework has secured commitments from 75 jurisdictions, with 48 targeting 2026 reporting and first automatic data exchange in June 2027. The United States and India are notable non-signatories, a fact that materially limits CARF’s near-term effectiveness as a global tax transparency mechanism.

FATF’s June 2025 update found that 73% of monitored jurisdictions have enacted Travel Rule legislation — progress, but with a long tail of non-compliant jurisdictions creating exploitable gaps. FATF President Elisa de Anda Madrazo (Mexico) has emphasised that the gaps are concentrated in smaller jurisdictions that serve as offshore processing nodes.

The BRICS dimension adds a further layer of complexity. BRICS nations represent 47.9% of global population. Russia and others have piloted a “Unit” gold-anchored token as an intra-BRICS settlement instrument, with an October 2025 pilot. The Trump administration has threatened 100% tariffs on any nation pursuing a mechanism to bypass the US dollar — a threat that, whatever its legal status, signals the degree to which tokenization policy has become geopolitically charged.

Implications for Policy Professionals

Several structural conclusions follow from the comparative landscape.

Convergence is real but incomplete. MiCA has become a reference point for most major jurisdictions. Its stablecoin reserve requirements, CASP licensing model, and whitepaper disclosure obligations appear in some form in Singapore’s PSA, Hong Kong’s Stablecoin Ordinance, and the US GENIUS Act. The convergence is on principles, not on specifics — and the specifics determine competitive positioning.

The jurisdiction shopping equilibrium is unstable. The UAE, Switzerland, Singapore, and Hong Kong are in genuine competition for institutional domicile. Each regulatory update changes the relative attractiveness calculus. The gap between Singapore’s restrictiveness toward offshore-facing firms and Hong Kong’s somewhat more permissive VATP approach is a live competitive variable.

International coordination lags market development. CARF will not achieve full effectiveness until the US and India join. The FSB peer review gaps indicate that many G20 members have not implemented even the basic 2023 crypto framework. FATF’s Travel Rule compliance remains at 73% after years of guidance. The international infrastructure is catching up to the market, not leading it.

The political economy of legislation matters as much as the text. The GENIUS Act’s provisions reflect not a technocratic optimisation but a negotiated political settlement — between the Senate Banking Committee, the crypto industry’s lobbying operation, the traditional banking sector’s counter-lobbying, and the Federal Reserve’s institutional preferences. Understanding the settlement helps anticipate where the pressure points for future amendment lie.

Policy professionals who need to operate across this landscape require not just a knowledge of what the rules say, but a deep understanding of why they were designed as they were — and where they are likely to move next.