Indonesia has been reforming its crypto regulations over the past few months. Regulators have now announced their plan to launch a national crypto exchange in 2023. The Asian country is currently in midst of transferring regulatory power from the commodities to the securities authority. The platform is set to be established before the delegation of responsibility.
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Crypto Exchange Part Of Indonesia’s Broader Financial Reform
For now, digital assets are traded alongside commodity contracts under the supervision of the Commodity Futures Trading Regulatory Agency, Bappebti. The agency’s acting head Didid Noordiatmoko confirmed on Wednesday that the FSA will assume regulatory power over the assets over the next two years, by which time the exchange will likely be set up.
The said move is a part of the broader financial reform that the nation launched in December last year. Despite the macro instability, investors have been flocking into the crypto market.
Bloomberg noted that there were 16 million crypto investors in Indonesia in the first 11 months of the year. For context, the same stood at 11.2 million at the end of 2021. The trading volume, however, remained unappealing. Illustrating the numbers, the report noted,
“Trading value shrank to about 300 trillion rupiah ($19.2 billion) during that period, a fraction of the 859 trillion rupiah seen in the previous year.“
At present, there are reportedly 383 crypto assets and 10 local coins that can be traded in Indonesia. Parallelly, another 151 assets and 10 coins are under review by Bappebti.
Indonesia has also been making strides on the CBDC front. In Q4 2022, the central bank launched a white paper on digital currency for Rupiah. Bank Indonesia [BI] followed the path of other federal banks around the world that have been trying and testing their own central bank digital currencies.
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