FinTech

The NTU Center for Innovative Enterprise Law (CIEL) commits to overcome the legal challenges faced by enterprises amid rapid technological change and market development. This year’s seminar, themed “Web 3.0 Finance and Regulatory Innovation,” explored the potential impacts of tokenization on asset markets and payment systems, and proposed future directions for Taiwan’s legal and regulatory frameworks.

Session I featured a talk by CIEL Deputy Director Prof. Christopher Chen with Associate Professor Yi-Chen Lai from Tohoku University being the discussant. The session focuses on “Real World Asset (RWA) Tokenization”, with following take-aways:

Legal Foundations of RWA Tokenization: Rights and Value Represented by Tokens

Deputy Director Chen highlights that tokenization of assets follows the long history of using legal instruments to represent underlying assets, rights, or value. To understand legal infrastructure of asset tokenization, one can explore legal techniques applicable to various kinds of securities and instruments that may represent a variety of assets, rights or values. In turn, the nature of underlying assets or values might affect legal underpinnings of ‘real-work assets’ and subsequent issues of transaction design, legal validity, and risk allocation.

Balancing Technological Advantages and Legal Risks

While technological and tokenization of assets may offer some benefits such as transactional efficiency and fractionalization of ownership, Dr Chen cautioned that there could also be new legal issues and challenges facing RWAs that require solution in the future, no matter it is based on private ordering or requires legal clarifications in statutes.

Nuanced Classification of Rights and Its Implications

Dr Chen further examined how assets, rights, or value can be integrated into legal instruments, which in turn determines the liquidity of the assets represented by the token. Building on this, the nature of the rights embodied in an asset token directly affects the applicable legal framework. Whether tokenization should fall within the domain of private autonomy or requires explicit legislative intervention remains an important policy question.

International Insights and Forward-Looking Issues

Deputy Director Chen highlighted that RWA-related law and policy can draw from existing regulatory structures and international developments. Associate Professor Lai noted that practice field in Japan have already conducted pilot projects involving gold, sake, and other assets, raising debates over token legal characterization, asset transfer, and rights enforcement. Assoc. Prof. Lai further posed a thought-provoking question: if RWAs begin to represent personal attributes, identity categories, or other status-related characteristics, what legal issues would arise? This underscores the high malleability of RWAs and the accompanying regulatory uncertainty, reinforcing the importance of sustained research in fintech law.

The session concluded successfully, further reinforcing CIEL’s direction to advancing research on RWA and fintech regulatory frameworks, with the hope of contributing forward-looking insights to Taiwan’s future legal innovation.

On April 25, 2025, Deputy Director Professor Yueh-Ping Yang of CIEL attended the award ceremony hosted by the National Science and Technology Council (NSTC), where he was honored with the 2024 Ta-You Wu Memorial Award.

Since 2018, Professor Yang has dedicated his research to blockchain finance and the regulation of virtual assets. His work spans a wide range of topics, including initial coin offerings, the issuance and settlement of security-type virtual assets, regulation of virtual asset trading platforms, decentralized finance (DeFi), non-fungible tokens (NFTs), anti-money laundering (AML) measures for virtual assets, cross-border supervision, and comparative legal studies on international virtual asset regulation. His research on Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) was particularly distinguished, as it was one of only four papers selected globally at the 2022 Washington FinTech Week and was subsequently published in the SSCI-indexed Northwestern Journal of International Law and Business.

Professor Yang’s research achievements not only contribute significantly to academic scholarship but have also had a substantial impact on the development of Taiwan’s virtual asset regulatory framework over the past five years. He has been invited to provide policy consultation, legal recommendations, and training to multiple government agencies, including the Financial Supervisory Commission, the Executive Yuan’s Anti-Money Laundering Office, the Central Bank, the Ministry of Digital Affairs, and the Ministry of Justice. His contributions include assisting authorities in drafting the AML registration system for Virtual Asset Service Providers (VASPs), the draft Virtual Asset Service Act, and regulatory guidelines for VASPs and stablecoins, thereby making a profound impact on both theory and practice.

Deputy Director Yueh-Ping Yang of CIEL was invited by the Asia FinTech Alliance to chair the online seminar “Regulatory Perspectives on FinTech Innovation in Taiwan” on March 25, 2025.

Serving as moderator and opening speaker, Deputy Director Yueh-Ping Yang introduced the session, which featured two distinguished speakers. Brenda Hu, Director of the Department of Financial Market Development and Innovation at the Financial Supervisory Commission (FSC), presented on Taiwan’s FinTech development strategies and progress, highlighting policy support and emerging industry opportunities. Alex Huang, Chief of the Securities Firms Division at the Securities and Futures Bureau of the FSC, shared Taiwan’s practical experience in virtual asset regulation and discussed the latest regulatory developments.

The session concluded with a comprehensive Q&A, offering participants an opportunity to engage directly with the experts and deepen dialogue.

This online seminar focused on Taiwan’s FinTech development strategies, practical approaches to virtual asset regulation, and the balance between regulation and innovation. It provided international industry leaders and policymakers with insights into Taiwan’s regulatory direction for FinTech and virtual assets, while also fostering a platform for collaboration across industry, government, and academia.

From February 4 to 7, 2025, Deputy Director Professor Yueh-Ping Yang of our Center was invited to participate in the Transnational Program organized by the Faculty of Law, Waseda University. He delivered a lecture titled “FinTech’s Challenges to Financial Regulation: An Accountability Perspective” to the participants of the program.

The Transnational Program is a long-standing international short-term course hosted annually by Waseda University’s Faculty of Law. The 2025 program focused on the theme of financial technology (FinTech) and was jointly organized by Professor Shuichi Furuya, Director of the Graduate School of Law at Waseda University, and Professor Atsushi Koide. Participants included faculty members and students from National Taiwan University (Taiwan), Seoul National University (Korea), Queen Mary University of London (United Kingdom), Bucerius Law School in Hamburg (Germany), and Waseda University (Japan). The program featured lectures and student group presentations on various FinTech-related issues.

In his lecture, Deputy Director Yueh-Ping Yang highlighted how the emergence of FinTech—characterized by the cross-border nature of the internet, the decentralization of blockchain, and the automation of artificial intelligence—has diluted and restructured the traditional “regulatory intermediaries” upon which financial supervision has long relied. This transformation poses significant challenges to conventional accountability frameworks in financial regulation.

Deputy Director Yang further proposed several potential directions for regulatory adaptation. These include: (1) direct regulation of FinTech providers, (2) indirect regulation of FinTech providers through traditional financial institutions, and (3) technical regulation conducted in cooperation with non-financial regulatory authorities.