On Tuesday, July 28, 2026, Binance co-founder Changpeng “CZ” Zhao sat down for a fireside chat titled “One ASEAN, One Digital Economy” at the ASEAN Tech Summit in Manila — and used the stage to back a specific, structural proposal for how the region’s crypto industry should be regulated going forward: license passporting. The idea is straightforward on paper. A crypto exchange, wallet provider, or token issuer that’s already licensed and supervised in one ASEAN member state would get a simplified, faster approval process when expanding into another member state, instead of filing a brand-new application and starting compliance review from zero in every single country it wants to operate in.
CZ pointed directly at Europe’s Markets in Crypto-Assets regulation, or MiCA, as the model worth copying. MiCA lets a crypto firm authorized in any one European Union member state “passport” that license across the entire bloc — one approval, 27 markets. Applied to Southeast Asia, the same logic would mean a firm licensed by, say, Singapore’s Monetary Authority or the Philippine SEC could expand into Indonesia, Thailand, or Vietnam without restarting the entire licensing process each time. Asked about the political difficulty of getting ten different national regulators to agree on mutual recognition, CZ was blunt: “I think that’s mostly a political problem,” not a technical one — the mechanics of passporting are well understood, the obstacle is regulators actually agreeing to trust each other’s oversight.
The Idea Didn’t Start With CZ — It Started With a Filipino Fintech Executive
The detail that matters most for this market: CZ wasn’t the one who originated the passporting concept at this event. According to coverage of the summit, it was FinTech Alliance PH founding chair Lito Villanueva who first raised the idea of ASEAN-wide crypto license passporting on stage — CZ’s remarks were an endorsement of a proposal already put forward by a Philippine fintech leader, not an idea Binance imported and pitched to the region. That framing matters for how this story should be read locally: this wasn’t Manila hosting a foreign executive’s regional agenda, it was a Philippine industry figure setting the regional agenda and getting one of crypto’s most recognizable names to back it publicly, on Philippine soil.
There’s already a real, working precedent for this kind of regional recognition mechanism in Southeast Asia, just not yet for crypto. The ASEAN Capital Markets Forum’s Collective Investment Schemes Framework — a mutual-recognition system that lets qualifying investment funds be sold across participating member states under a single home-country authorization — has been operating since 2014, when it launched among Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand. The Philippines joined that framework in 2021. It’s a slower-moving, more conservative corner of finance than crypto, but it’s proof that ASEAN regulators are structurally capable of building and joining a passporting arrangement when they choose to — the CIS framework is the closest real-world template for what a crypto equivalent would need to look like.
Why Passporting Would Matter More to Founders Than to Big Exchanges
It’s tempting to read a passporting proposal as mainly benefiting large, already-licensed players like Binance, who could use it to re-enter markets faster. But the bigger structural beneficiary of a real ASEAN passporting regime would be smaller, regionally-ambitious crypto and blockchain startups — the ones for whom filing five or six separate national licensing applications, each with its own capital requirements, local presence rules, and review timeline, is simply not affordable. A single-market Philippine crypto startup today effectively has to choose: stay domestic, or absorb multi-year, multi-jurisdiction compliance costs to expand regionally. Passporting, if it’s ever actually built, would collapse that cost difference significantly — closer to how a fintech startup licensed in one EU country can scale across the bloc under MiCA today.
None of this is close to becoming policy yet. CZ’s comments were an endorsement at a fireside chat, not a regulatory announcement, and no ASEAN body has published a formal passporting framework or timeline. The distance between “a well-known executive said this would be good” and “ten national regulators agree to mutually recognize each other’s crypto licenses” is significant — the CIS framework itself took years of negotiation among a smaller, more aligned group of markets before it launched. But the fact that the idea was raised by a Philippine fintech leader, on a Manila stage, and got immediate public backing from one of the industry’s most-watched figures, puts the Philippines in an unusually visible position in a conversation that, if it goes anywhere, will reshape how every regionally-minded crypto business in Southeast Asia thinks about expansion.
What This Means for Philippine Founders
If you’re building a crypto, blockchain, or digital-asset business in the Philippines with any regional ambition — and increasingly, that’s most of them, given how small the purely domestic market still is relative to Indonesia or Vietnam — this is worth tracking closely, not because anything has changed yet, but because a Philippine voice is now credibly attached to the proposal that would change it. A real passporting regime would directly lower the single biggest structural cost standing between a Philippine SEC-licensed startup and genuine ASEAN-wide operation: redundant, per-country licensing. Founders shouldn’t build a expansion roadmap around this happening on any particular timeline — it’s an idea with one high-profile endorsement, not a regulatory pathway — but it’s a reminder that Philippine regulators and industry figures are actively shaping this conversation rather than just reacting to what Singapore or Jakarta decide. Worth watching whether FinTech Alliance PH or the Philippine SEC take any follow-up steps on this in the coming months.
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