The Financial Supervisory Commission (FSC) is drawing up national standards for initial coin offerings (ICOs) to make virtual tokens as easy to invest in as stocks and just as liquid, FSC Chairman Wellington Koo (顧立雄) said yesterday.
The draft is to be completed by June next year, he told a meeting of the Legislative Yuan’s Finance Committee.
Koo made the remarks after Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator William Tseng (曾銘宗) said at a question-and-answer session on whether the government would regulate ICOs.
To conduct an ICO, businesses typically post a white paper on the Internet that outlines their ideas on token use, issue requirements and expected growth before offering virtual tokens for sale.
However, 127 white papers worldwide were found last year to have been faked and as of April, 80 papers were found to be inaccurate, Tseng said. Citing data from ICO advisory firm Satis Group, Tseng said that 81 percent of ICOs have been identified as scams.
The commission would regulate ICOs, Koo said, but added that tokens exchanged for goods, such as those used in accruing points at convenience stores or mileage points accepted by airlines, would not be covered by the standards.
“The more we regulate, the more this new economic behavior wanes,” Koo said.
The commission has no intention of curbing the creativity and productivity associated with cryptocurrencies if they are not used as securities, he said.
“People often confuse an ICO with the trading of cryptocurrencies,” Securities and Futures Bureau Deputy Director-General Tsai Li-ling (蔡麗玲) said by telephone.
An ICO is a type of public fundraising activity, whereas cryptocurrency trading is similar to trading in gold, for which the commission only implements money laundering controls, Tsai said.
If the token in an ICO functioned similar to a security, the commission would define it as a “securities token” and subject it to the Securities and Exchange Act (證交法), Tsai said.
The issuer would also need to disclose information similar to what companies that are publicly traded need to do now, she said.
However, without referencing the standards of other countries, it would be difficult to draft standards for ICOs, Tsai said.
The government tends to regard cryptocurrencies as virtue commodities or assets rather than currencies, because they have no intrinsic value, central bank Governor Yang Chin-long (楊金龍) told the committee, explaining why the commission should be responsible for regulating ICOs.
The commission said it has helped prosecutors investigate three cases of suspected ICO fraud.
One of the cases involved a private company advertising that coins could be exchanged for equities, which might have violated the Securities and Exchange Act and the Banking Act (銀行法), the commission said.
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday said that its investment plan in Arizona is going according to schedule, following a local media report claiming that the company is planning to break ground on its third wafer fab in the US in June. In a statement, TSMC said it does not comment on market speculation, but that its investments in Arizona are proceeding well. TSMC is investing more than US$65 billion in Arizona to build three advanced wafer fabs. The first one has started production using the 4-nanometer (nm) process, while the second one would start mass production using the
A TAIWAN DEAL: TSMC is in early talks to fully operate Intel’s US semiconductor factories in a deal first raised by Trump officials, but Intel’s interest is uncertain Broadcom Inc has had informal talks with its advisers about making a bid for Intel Corp’s chip-design and marketing business, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing people familiar with the matter. Nothing has been submitted to Intel and Broadcom could decide not to pursue a deal, according to the Journal. Bloomberg News earlier reported that Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) is in early talks for a controlling stake in Intel’s factories at the request of officials at US President Donald Trump’s administration, as the president looks to boost US manufacturing and maintain the country’s leadership in critical technologies. Trump officials raised the
‘SILVER LINING’: Although the news caused TSMC to fall on the local market, an analyst said that as tariffs are not set to go into effect until April, there is still time for negotiations US President Donald Trump on Tuesday said that he would likely impose tariffs on semiconductor, automobile and pharmaceutical imports of about 25 percent, with an announcement coming as soon as April 2 in a move that would represent a dramatic widening of the US leader’s trade war. “I probably will tell you that on April 2, but it’ll be in the neighborhood of 25 percent,” Trump told reporters at his Mar-a-Lago club when asked about his plan for auto tariffs. Asked about similar levies on pharmaceutical drugs and semiconductors, the president said that “it’ll be 25 percent and higher, and it’ll
CHIP BOOM: Revenue for the semiconductor industry is set to reach US$1 trillion by 2032, opening up opportunities for the chip pacakging and testing company, it said ASE Technology Holding Co (日月光投控), the world’s largest provider of outsourced semiconductor assembly and test (OSAT) services, yesterday launched a new advanced manufacturing facility in Penang, Malaysia, aiming to meet growing demand for emerging technologies such as generative artificial intelligence (AI) applications. The US$300 million facility is a critical step in expanding ASE’s global footprint, offering an alternative for customers from the US, Europe, Japan, South Korea and China to assemble and test chips outside of Taiwan amid efforts to diversify supply chains. The plant, the company’s fifth in Malaysia, is part of a strategic expansion plan that would more than triple
RSS