PANAMA Trends and Developments Contributed by: Teresa Carballo and Edgar Young, Pacifica Legal
to decentralised liquidity without intermediation or custody falls outside the SMV’s scope and does not require authorisation. Vaults and curators Vaults and curators are a newer but rapidly expand- ing niche. A vault is regularly a smart contract that accepts deposits and runs a predefined, automated strategy with depositors receiving vault tokens that represent their share of the pool. A curator is the spe- cialist firm that designs and risk-manages the strategy behind a vault. The curator selects which markets and venues the vault may use, sets exposure caps and leverage limits, defines rebalancing rules, and moni- tors positions as conditions change. For clients, the important point is that a Panamanian company can sit in either of two distinct roles in this structure: • as the vault interface: the front end or UI through which users access the vault; or • as the curator itself: the entity that designs the strategy, sets the risk parameters, and earns the management or performance fees. In neither role does the Panamanian entity hold user funds. Provided the company does not custody assets, give investment advice on securities, or man- age securities accounts, acting as a vault interface or as a curator does not trigger banking or securities licensing in Panama, and fits squarely within the non- custodial, technology-provider analysis described above. Real - world assets The tokenisation of real-world assets is one of the clearer growth stories of the past year. In simple terms, this means representing an off-chain asset, for instance, a Treasury bill, a private-credit loan, an invoice, a fund interest, as a token that can be held, transferred, and used on-chain, while the underlying yield continues to come from real-world economic activity. That gives these instruments a return pro- file less correlated with crypto market cycles, which is a large part of their appeal to institutional alloca- tors. Tokenised real-world assets are also increas- ingly delivered through the vault structures described
above, so the interface and curator roles are just as relevant here. Delta - neutral strategies Delta-neutral strategies are another of the fastest- growing categories in the market and have become a distinct line of business in their own right. A delta- neutral strategy is built to remove directional market exposure: it pairs offsetting positions, for instance, holding a spot asset while shorting a perpetual future on the same asset, or lending one asset while bor- rowing another, therefore returns come from funding rates, or spreads or yield rather than from the price of the underlying going up or down. A Panamanian entity can operate the front end through which users access a delta-neutral vault and/or act as the cura- tor that designs and risk-manages the strategy. The regulatory analysis runs throughout this whole part. A non-custodial entity that does not take deposits, does not intermediate, and does not deal in securities is not carrying on a regulated banking or securities activity in Panama. Prediction markets Prediction markets have become one of the most closely watched questions of 2026. The encourag- ing development for the sector is Opinion 01-2026, in which the SMV concluded that prediction markets are not within the scope of the activities, products, or services subject to securities regulation in Panama. That removes the most obvious source of securities- law uncertainty for these platforms and is a mean- ingful signal of the regulator’s continued, consistent approach. The open question is gaming. Panama’s gambling and betting activities are governed by the Junta de Con- trol de Juegos (the JCJ) under Decree Law No 2 of 1998, which captures games of luck or chance involv- ing wagers or prizes, with online activity addressed through Resolution No 65 of 2002, as amended in 2020. Games of skill are not expressly regulated, and there are reasonable arguments that many prediction- market designs are skill-based and operator-neutral rather than games of chance. However, the JCJ has not issued an official public position specifically on prediction markets, and until it does, the classification question remains genuinely unsettled. This is the main
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