Thailand Waives Capital Gains Tax on Crypto Trades Through Licensed Platforms 

Key Takeaways

• Thailand has removed personal income tax on crypto trading profits, but only for trades made through domestically licensed exchanges, brokers and dealers.
• The exemption runs for five years, backdated from January 2025 to the end of 2029, and covers only the profit on a sale, not the original investment.
• Trades through unlicensed or offshore platforms, DeFi swaps, mining and staking are excluded and remain taxable as usual.
• The policy is designed to pull crypto trading onto regulated local exchanges, not to loosen oversight of the sector.

Thailand has scrapped capital gains tax on crypto trading profits for individuals who trade through platforms licensed by the Securities and Exchange Commission of Thailand (SEC Thailand). The exemption was gazetted in September 2025 under Ministerial Regulation No. 399, applies retroactively from 1 January 2025, and runs until 31 December 2029.

What the exemption actually covers

The relief is narrower than the “0% crypto tax” headlines suggest.

• Only the profit is exempt. The exemption applies to the gain above the original cost base, not the capital invested. That capital was never taxable income in the first place.
• The seller must be an individual. Companies and trusts trading crypto in Thailand aren’t covered.
• The trade has to run through a licensed venue. That means an exchange, broker or dealer holding an SEC Thailand licence under the Emergency Decree on Digital Asset Businesses 2018, not any platform operating in the country.

What’s excluded

Several categories of activity sit outside the exemption entirely:

• Trades on unlicensed or foreign exchanges, which continue to face ordinary personal income tax.
• DeFi swaps, peer-to-peer sales and wallet-to-wallet transfers made outside a licensed platform.
• Mining, staking and airdrop income, where Thailand’s Revenue Department has yet to issue separate guidance.

Why Thailand is doing this

Legal analysis from Nishimura & Asahi estimates the measure will still generate at least Baht 1 billion in additional tax revenue over the exemption period, on the view that shifting trading volume onto licensed platforms broadens the base subject to other reporting and taxes even as capital gains go untaxed.

The design tells its own story. Thailand isn’t cutting its regulatory requirements to attract crypto capital, it’s using a tax incentive to reward people for trading through the venues it already supervises. Crypto.news has described this as “regulated onshoring”, contrasting it with the United States, which continues taxing digital asset gains while relying on securities rules and market-structure legislation rather than a direct tax lever.

How that compares with Australia

There’s no equivalent in Australian law. The ATO treats the disposal of a crypto asset as a CGT event regardless of which exchange was used to make the trade, local or offshore. The standard 12-month CGT discount can apply, but there’s no platform-based exemption of the kind Thailand has just legislated, and the ATO’s data-matching program collects transaction data directly from designated service providers to check what’s reported.

What it means for investors

Thailand’s move is one example of a jurisdiction using tax settings and licensing together to shape where crypto trading happens, rather than simply raising or lowering the tax rate. Whether it becomes a wider regional pattern or stays a five-year experiment will depend on how much volume it actually pulls onto SEC Thailand’s licensed venues over the next few years.

It’s a change to Thai policy, not Australian policy, so local tax treatment of crypto gains is unaffected either way. Ainslie Crypto continues to operate under Australian regulation, holding client digital assets in custody within that framework regardless of what other jurisdictions decide to do with theirs.

This article is general information only and does not constitute financial advice. Past performance is not indicative of future results. Always conduct your own research or consult a licensed financial adviser before making investment decisions.