TURKEY Law and Practice Contributed by: Caghan Tansel, TANSEL
Stablecoins are relevant in Türkiye mainly as trad- ing and liquidity instruments within the crypto-asset ecosystem, not as payment instruments. The Cen- tral Bank’s 2021 regulation continues to prohibit the direct or indirect use of crypto-assets in payments and restricts payment and e-money institutions from inter- mediating certain flows involving crypto-asset plat- forms. As a result, stablecoin-related models may be considered in the context of trading, custody, transfer and portfolio management through compliant crypto- asset service providers, but not as merchant payment, checkout or payment-settlement use cases. Another use case is tokenisation. Market participants are increasingly examining tokenised securities, fund interests, real-world assets, precious metals, real estate-linked structures and other digitally represent- ed rights. In practice, these projects require careful legal classification because a token may fall within capital markets, crypto-asset, payment, property, consumer, tax or IP rules depending on its design. The CMB’s secondary legislation recognises broad categories of crypto-assets and regulates services such as trading, initial sale or distribution, exchange, transfer and custody. The Digital Turkish Lira is also an important infra- structure-related use case, although it should be dis- tinguished from private crypto-assets. The Central Bank’s second-phase progress report states that the project is being developed towards a minimum viable product, with work focused on programmable pay- ments, offline payments and cross-border proof-of- concept studies. The same report refers to interop- erability with existing and future digital ecosystems, financial-intermediary integration and self-sovereign identity architecture. These developments may influ- ence private-sector wallet, identity and settlement design even before any final decision is made on issuance. NFTs, gaming tokens, loyalty tokens and digital col- lectibles remain relevant but more selective than dur- ing the earlier NFT boom. The stronger current focus is not simply on minting digital art, but on whether a token can validly represent a contractual right, access right, game utility, collectible interest or IP-linked enti- tlement. Because user awareness of tokenisation,
Web3 and staking remains relatively low in Türkiye, these projects still require significant user education and careful consumer-facing disclosures. What Issues Are Likely to Impact the Use of Blockchain Over the Next 12 Months? The most important issue will be licensing imple- mentation. The market is moving from transition to authorisation, and platforms will need to demonstrate that they can meet CMB expectations on governance, minimum capital, internal systems, audit, custody, proof-of-reserves and customer-asset segregation. The transitional CMB lists are not equivalent to final authorisation, and the 2026 deadline extensions show that custody integration and authorisation mechanics will remain live issues. The second issue will be AML and Travel Rule compli- ance. MASAK’s 2025 guidance and Communiqué No 29 require crypto-asset service providers to operate with a much more mature compliance architecture. This will affect onboarding, remote identification, wallet screening, counterparty information collection, suspicious transaction reporting and the handling of transfers involving unregistered wallets or foreign pro- viders. The third issue is taxation. A crypto-asset transac- tion tax was discussed in the 2026 legislative process, including a proposed tax on crypto-asset sales and transfers performed or intermediated by crypto-asset service providers. Those provisions did not ultimately become part of Law No 7577 as published in April 2026, but the discussion shows that tax policy remains an open area and may return in a revised form. The fourth issue is the continued separation between investment use cases and payment use cases. Tür- kiye’s 2021 payment ban remains a major constraint for merchant checkout, crypto-to-fiat payment inter- mediation and payment/e-money institution involve- ment. Unless the Central Bank revises that position, blockchain projects that involve payment settlement will need to be structured with particular caution. The fifth issue is the Digital Turkish Lira and interop- erability. The Central Bank’s work on programmable payments, offline payments, digital identity, financial-
655 CHAMBERS.COM
Powered by FlippingBook