Taiwan’s Financial Watchdog to Establish STO-Related Fundraising Mechanism This Year

Taiwan’s Financial Supervisory Commission (FSC) will establish a new fundraising mechanism based on security token offerings (STOs), according to an article published by financial news outlet Taiwan Economic Daily on Monday, March 4.

The FSC, an independent government agency subordinate to the Executive Yuan of the Republic of China (Taiwan), has revealed plans to adopt an STO-related fundraising mechanism. A symposium aimed at listening to the opinions of the industry’s practitioners on the issue is scheduled for the end of April this year, with plans to formulate relevant issuance standards and norms by the end of June 2019.

Gu Lixiong, the chairman of Taiwan’s FSC, underlined that there could be different exchanges for STOs not limited to existing stock exchanges. He also added:

“An STO is an emerging product of the next generation of capital markets, which may affect the popularity of Taiwan’s new creative teams in the international market in the next five to ten years.”

As Cointelegraph wrote on Oct. 24, Taiwan’s financial regulator had already revealed plans to outline official regulations for initial coin offerings by June 2019, reversing a hands-off policy adopted in 2017, according to the FSC chairman.

Elsewhere in Asia, last December, Tipsuda Thavaramara, the deputy secretary of the the ThaiSecurities and Exchanges Commission, announced that the regulator hadn’t decided yet how to regulate STOs in terms of share ownership, voting rights and dividends, as Cointelegraph reported on Dec. 1.