Turkish Central Bank Bans Using Crypto-assets in Payments

Osman Gazi Güçlütürk
9 min readApr 16, 2021
Source: FinTech Istanbul

Turkish Central Bank’s (“TCB”) regulation on “not using crypto-assets” in payments (“Regulation”) was promulgated in today’s official gazette and shall enter into force on 30th April 2021.

Regulation is comprised of 6 Articles. Articles 1, 2, 5, 6 regulate typical issues of purpose and scope, grounds, effective date on which the Regulation shall enter into force, and the authority responsible for enforcing the Regulation, respectively. With 4 of its 6 Articles being typical boiler-plate provisions, the Regulation might seem insignificant at first glance, but this could not be further from the truth as the remaining 2 articles implement a practical ban on using crypto-assets for payments in Turkey.

Core Provisions

Article 3 and 4 of the Regulation read as follows:

“Article 3: Not Using Crypto-assets in Payments[1]

(1) For the purposes of this Regulation, crypto-assets (“kripto varlık” in Turkish) means intangible assets that are created virtually using the distributed ledger technology or a similar technology, distributed through digital networks, and not classified as fiat money, bank money[2], electronic money, payment instrument, security or capital market instrument.

(2) Crypto-assets cannot be used in…

--

--

Osman Gazi Güçlütürk
Osman Gazi Güçlütürk

Written by Osman Gazi Güçlütürk

Lawyer | IP&IT&Blockchain Law| PhD Candidate in Law & Computer Science| Self-taught Coder | LL.B. (Galatasaray) - LL.M. (LSE) - M.A. (Ankara) - MJur (Oxon)