📰 Key Takeaways

Thailand has announced a five-year 0% capital gains tax exemption for crypto investors trading on platforms approved by Thailand’s Securities and Exchange Commission, running from January 1, 2025 through December 31, 2029, aiming to strengthen Thailand’s position as a regional crypto hub and support its growing crypto digital nomad community. Trades made through unapproved or offshore exchanges still fall under regular personal income tax rates, which can go as high as 38%. The arrangement brings crypto taxation in line with how capital gains on traditional securities are treated — Thailand had already exempted crypto profits from a 7% VAT earlier in 2026. In other news, Rob Hamilton, founder of the Bitcoin Red Team, says he’s been forced to rely on open-source Chinese AI models to keep his codebase-analysis research on protecting Bitcoin infrastructure going, after OpenAI restricted his access to its tools. He didn’t mince words about how “deeply painful” it feels as a patriotic American to be pushed into that choice, pointing out that “black-hat hackers aren’t affected by these restrictions — it’s the white hats who get cut off.” He described the industry as caught in a policy-level local optimum, where compliant defenders end up locked out of the strongest AI capabilities. The Bitcoin Policy Institute and several blockchain companies have since jointly called on major frontier AI labs to establish clear, trusted channels for qualified open-source and digital-asset defenders to access their most capable models. Separately, a report from Hashed Open Research and SCBX shows on-chain transaction volume in the Asia-Pacific region grew 68% year-over-year, from $1.4 trillion to $2.36 trillion — the fastest-growing region globally, driven mainly by Southeast Asian countries where consumers have skipped credit cards and bank transfers altogether in favor of mobile payments, which now account for 60% of total payment volume in the region. See the original article for full details.

💬 JudyAI Lab Take

There’s something ironic about reading these two stories side by side: Thailand zeroing out its crypto capital gains tax for five years, while a Bitcoin defense researcher gets pushed into open-source Chinese models because of AI access restrictions.

On one side, policy is actively rolling out the welcome mat — Thailand’s five-year 0% capital gains tax, on top of its earlier VAT exemption, is a clear play to become a regional crypto hub. On the other side, AI access policy is accidentally building walls, locking compliant white-hat researchers out of the strongest models while leaving unrestricted attackers completely unaffected. That’s a good reminder for anyone building AI tools or crypto infrastructure: when regulatory and access policy design only accounts for one dimension of risk, it tends to create a local optimum somewhere else. And with Asia-Pacific on-chain volume up 68% year-over-year and mobile payment penetration already at 60%, the market is clearly moving faster than policy design in a lot of these cases.

If you’re building anything that depends on AI capability access, it’s worth checking upfront whether legitimate use cases have a clear path through — don’t assume restrictions only ever stop the bad actors.

📅 Original Article Info

🔗 Further Reading