Crypto is legal to hold and trade in Türkiye but may not be used to pay for goods or services (Central Bank regulation, in force 30 April 2021). Under Law No. 7518 of 2 July 2024, exchanges and custodians need a Capital Markets Board licence under Law No. 6362; unlicensed service carries 3 to 5 years' imprisonment. MASAK requires verified sender data for transfers of 30,000 Turkish Lira or more (since 7 October 2026), 48 or 72 hour waits for some withdrawals and stablecoin limits of 3,000 US dollars a day. Platforms may suspend accounts for 48 hours in fraud cases. No crypto tax is in force.
Crypto in Türkiye is no longer an unregulated corner of the market. Since Law No. 7518 took effect on 2 July 2024, exchanges and custodians need a licence from the Capital Markets Board, Sermaye Piyasası Kurulu (SPK), and since 2021 they have been obliged parties under the anti money laundering rules. The rules kept moving after that: MASAK imposed 48 and 72 hour withdrawal waits and stablecoin limits in June 2025; since 25 December 2025, Article 128/A of the Code of Criminal Procedure, Law No. 5271, has let platforms suspend accounts for 48 hours in listed fraud cases; in March 2026 the Capital Markets Board extended the licensing deadline for existing platforms; and on 7 October 2026 the identification threshold for crypto transfers rose from 15,000 to 30,000 Turkish Lira. Paying for goods with crypto remains prohibited, and no crypto specific tax is in force. This guide sets out the framework as of October 2026 and what it means for a foreigner holding or trading crypto on a Turkish platform.
Four bodies share the field: the Capital Markets Board for licensing and supervision, the Central Bank for the payment ban, MASAK for anti money laundering rules, and the criminal courts and prosecutors for fraud.
| Element | Current Rule (October 2026) |
|---|---|
| Licensing of platforms and custodians | Capital Markets Board licence under Article 35/B of Law No. 6362 (section 3) |
| Minimum founding capital | 150 million Turkish Lira for a platform, 500 million Turkish Lira for a custodian, as set in March 2025 (section 3.1) |
| Unlicensed service, including foreign platforms targeting Türkiye | Three to five years' imprisonment and 5,000 to 10,000 days' judicial fine; website blocking (section 4) |
| Custody of customer assets | Own wallet as the rule, otherwise approved banks or authorised custodians; no deposit insurance or investor compensation (section 5) |
| Paying for goods and services in crypto | Prohibited since 30 April 2021 by Central Bank regulation (section 6) |
| Identification and travel rule | Verified sender data for transfers of 30,000 Turkish Lira or more since 7 October 2026 (section 7) |
| Withdrawal waits and stablecoin limits | 48 hours, or 72 hours for a first withdrawal, in the cases covered; 3,000 US dollars a day and 50,000 a month for stablecoins (section 7.3) |
| Fraud suspensions | Up to 48 hours under Article 128/A of Law No. 5271 (section 8) |
| Tax | No crypto specific tax in force; March 2026 proposals removed from the bill (section 9) |
Law No. 7518, adopted on 26 June 2024 and published on 2 July 2024, placed crypto rules inside the Capital Markets Law, Law No. 6362, rather than in a separate statute. It added definitions to Article 3, licensing and operating rules in Articles 35/B and 35/C, supervisory measures and sanctions in Articles 99/A and 99/B, the offences of unlicensed crypto services and embezzlement in Articles 109/A and 110/A, and a transitional regime in Provisional Article 11. Two Board communiqués followed on 13 March 2025: Communiqué III-35/B.1 on the establishment and operating principles of crypto asset service providers, and Communiqué III-35/B.2 on their working procedures and capital adequacy.
Article 3 defines a crypto asset as an intangible asset created and stored electronically using distributed ledger or similar technology, distributed over digital networks and capable of representing value or rights. A crypto asset service provider, kripto varlık hizmet sağlayıcı, means platforms, custodians and other institutions designated by the Board; a platform is an institution where crypto assets are bought, sold, initially sold or distributed, exchanged or transferred; and a wallet is the software, hardware or system that transfers crypto assets and stores them or their keys. Under Article 35/B(8), the law reaches crypto assets traded on platforms under the listing rules and tokens covered by Article 35/B(6), such as those carrying rights typical of capital market instruments. Article 35/B(9) keeps the Law on the Protection of the Value of the Turkish Currency, Law No. 1567, applicable to every crypto transaction.
Article 35/B(1) requires Board permission both to establish and to start operating a provider, which may then carry out only the activities the Board allows; share transfers also need approval. Shareholders with 10 percent or more, directors and controllers must not be bankrupt or convicted of listed offences such as fraud, embezzlement, money laundering, terrorist financing or tax evasion, and must have the necessary financial strength, honesty and reputation (Article 35/B(3)). Communiqué III-35/B.1 requires a joint stock company with its minimum capital paid fully in cash, a board of at least three members, a bank account for customer cash, a contract with a custodian and written procedures for complaints and price surveillance. Under Communiqué III-35/B.2, minimum founding capital is 150 million Turkish Lira for a platform and 500 million Turkish Lira for a custodian, and the Board may update these amounts each year in line with the revaluation rate, so the current figure must be checked.
Platforms operating in July 2024 had one month to declare that they would apply for a licence or liquidate (Provisional Article 11). Under Communiqué III-35/B.1, entities on the Board's Faaliyette Bulunanlar Listesi, the list of entities in operation, had to apply for an operating permit by 30 June 2025 and were due to hold their licence certificate by 30 June 2026. By a decision announced on 26 March 2026, the Board extended both that deadline and the deadline for contracts with custodians, tying the new end date to authorised custodians becoming widely available. For users, this means a listed platform may continue during the transition, but being listed is not the same as holding a final licence. The Board also publishes a list of entities in liquidation; a platform serving residents of Türkiye that appears on neither list should be treated as unauthorised.
The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Türkiye, TÜBİTAK, has a technical role. A licence requires information systems and technological infrastructure meeting TÜBİTAK criteria (Article 35/B(2)); listing rules may include technical criteria set with TÜBİTAK's opinion (Article 35/C(2)); the Board may request TÜBİTAK reports before allowing certain token sales (Article 35/B(6)); and information systems audit rules are set after hearing TÜBİTAK (Article 99/B(2)). Under Article 130(5), each platform pays 1 percent of its previous year's revenue, excluding interest, to the Board and another 1 percent to TÜBİTAK for blockchain development, by the end of May each year.
Under Article 99/A(1), a foreign platform that directs its activity at residents of Türkiye is providing unlicensed services. Targeting is presumed where it opens a workplace in Türkiye, runs a Turkish language website or promotes its services directly or through persons in Türkiye. Foreign providers had three months from 2 July 2024 to stop such activity, and crypto ATMs in Türkiye had to close within the same period (Provisional Article 11(4) and (5)). The Board can order content removal and access blocking against unlicensed crypto websites, implemented by the Access Providers Association (Article 99/A(3)); our article on internet access blocking in Türkiye explains how such orders work.
Under Article 109/A, anyone operating as a provider without permission, and the officers of a company doing so, face three to five years' imprisonment and a judicial fine of 5,000 to 10,000 days. Under Article 110/A, directors and staff who embezzle customer money or crypto assets face eight to fourteen years, or fourteen to twenty where the embezzlement is concealed by fraudulent conduct, with a judicial fine of at least three times the loss in that case. Breaches of Articles 35/B and 35/C or Board rules attract administrative fines under Articles 103 and 105 (Article 99/B(5)). The offence in Article 109/A is committed by the provider, but a user of an unauthorised platform has none of the protections described next.
Article 35/C(6) sets the principle that customers keep crypto assets in their own wallets. Otherwise custody must be provided by banks authorised by the Capital Markets Board and approved by the BDDK Board, or by authorised custodians, and customer cash must be kept at banks. Neither is covered by deposit insurance under Article 63 of the Banking Law, Law No. 5411. A licence does not put transactions under public guarantee, and crypto assets are outside the investor compensation scheme of Article 82 of Law No. 6362 (Article 35/C(4)).
Customer cash and crypto assets are separate from the provider's own assets and cannot be attached, pledged, included in its bankruptcy estate or frozen by interim measures for the provider's debts, even public debts (Article 35/C(7)). Orders against a customer's own holdings are executed only through the provider, and enforcement offices can query and attach them electronically under Article 78 of the Enforcement and Bankruptcy Law, Law No. 2004 (Article 99/B(7)). A foreigner with an unpaid debt in Türkiye should expect exchange balances to be reachable in the same way as bank balances.
Providers are liable for losses caused by their unlawful activities and by failure to deliver cash or crypto assets (Article 99/B(3)). For losses from the operation of their information systems, cyber attacks, security breaches or staff conduct, they are liable under the risk based rule in Article 71 of the Turkish Code of Obligations, Law No. 6098, which applies even where all expected care was taken (Article 99/B(4)); temporary outages without the provider's fault are excluded. Where the provider cannot pay, managers and staff may be personally liable according to their fault, and any contract term removing or limiting the provider's liability to customers is void (Article 35/C(1)).
The Central Bank's Regulation on the Non Use of Crypto Assets in Payments was published on 16 April 2021 and has applied since 30 April 2021. Crypto assets may not be used, directly or indirectly, in payments, and no service may be offered for such use (Article 3). Payment service providers may not build business models using crypto in payment services or electronic money, and payment and electronic money institutions may not act as intermediaries for crypto platforms or for fund transfers from them (Article 4). The regulation does not prohibit owning or trading crypto; it prohibits using crypto as a means of payment. A landlord or developer who agrees to be paid in USDT or bitcoin is entering into an arrangement the regulation forbids.
Providers have been obliged parties under the Regulation on Measures for the Prevention of Laundering Proceeds of Crime and Financing of Terrorism since 1 May 2021. Like a bank, a platform must identify a customer when a continuing relationship begins, whatever the amount, and for occasional transactions and crypto transfers of 30,000 Turkish Lira or more (Article 5, as amended on 7 October 2026; previously 15,000 Turkish Lira). A foreign customer's identity is verified on a passport, residence permit or other document approved by the Ministry of Treasury and Finance, and the address through a residence document, a recent utility bill or a public document (Article 6). Our MASAK compliance guide covers the wider reporting duties and MASAK's power to suspend transactions.
Article 24/A, added in December 2024, requires a transfer message of 30,000 Turkish Lira or more to carry the sender's name, wallet address and at least one identifier such as an address, date and place of birth, passport or tax number, all verified, plus the recipient's name and wallet address. Below that figure, names and wallet addresses are still included but not verified. A receiving provider that gets an incomplete message must ask for the missing data and return the transfer if it is not supplied. For transfers to or from a wallet not registered with any provider, or a foreign provider with no duty to share this data, the customer must declare the other party's name and an identifier, and the platform may ask for more and refuse the transfer.
MASAK General Communiqué No. 29, in force since 28 June 2025, added the measures users notice most:
Since 25 December 2025, Article 128/A of Law No. 5271 allows a bank, payment service provider or crypto asset service provider to suspend for up to 48 hours any account used in an offence where there is reasonable suspicion of theft through information systems (Article 142(2)(e) of the Turkish Penal Code, Law No. 5237), qualified fraud under Article 158(1)(f) or (l), or misuse of bank or credit cards under Article 245. The institution must notify the chief public prosecutor's office at once with all documents and also notify the account holder, who may apply to that office to lift the suspension; the prosecutor decides within 24 hours. Within the suspension period the proceeds may be seized by a judge or, in urgent cases, by the prosecutor's written order submitted to the judge within 24 hours, and the seizure lapses unless the judge rules within 48 hours. Proceeds shown to belong to the victim are returned, and the institution bears no civil liability for the suspension.
A victim whose money reached a Turkish platform now has a real chance of stopping it if the platform is told quickly; see our guide on filing a fraud complaint in Türkiye. Equally, a seller in a peer to peer trade who unknowingly receives fraud proceeds can find the account suspended within hours; the remedies are set out in our article on a frozen bank account in Türkiye. Article 158(4), added in July 2026 by Law No. 7589, also confirms that handing someone the details needed to use your bank or crypto account for unjust gain can amount to participation in fraud, with the penalty halved where that is the only contribution.
As of October 2026 no tax provision has been written specifically for crypto assets. The consolidated Income Tax Law, Law No. 193, does not mention crypto assets, and Law No. 7518 dealt with licensing, not tax. An omnibus bill submitted to the Grand National Assembly on 2 March 2026 proposed a transaction tax of three per ten thousand on sales and transfers through providers, together with withholding on gains, but the crypto articles were removed during the General Assembly debate at the end of March 2026, with officials indicating that the subject may return in a later bill. Until a specific rule is enacted, whether a gain is taxed depends on the general provisions of the Income Tax Law and the facts, such as whether trading is regular enough to be a business and whether the person is tax resident in Türkiye; our page on tax residency in Türkiye explains when worldwide income becomes taxable here. Keep full records of purchases, sales, transfers and bank accounts used, because they will be needed whatever rule applies.
The capital markets rules contain no general bar on foreign customers, but the rules above shape what is possible:
Every platform must have internal mechanisms to resolve customer objections and complaints (Article 35/C(1)), with written procedures, complaint records and the complaints unit's contact details on its website (Communiqué III-35/B.1, Articles 9 and 41). Complain there in writing, with screenshots, transaction hashes, wallet addresses and the time of each event. If there is no answer, a formal notice through a notary, ihtarname, fixes the date of default. The Capital Markets Board accepts complaints and reports about breaches of its rules and can act against the platform, but money claims are decided through the routes below, much as with banks; our guide to the role of BDDK explains the parallel for bank disputes.
Article 35/C(4) subjects disputes between platforms and customers to the general provisions. Where the customer is an individual acting for private purposes, the contract can fall within the definition of a consumer transaction in Article 3 of the Consumer Protection Law, Law No. 6502, which would bring in the consumer arbitration committee for disputes below 186,000 Turkish Lira in 2026 and mediation followed by the consumer court above it. A customer trading as a business, or a company, goes to the commercial court after mediation for money claims (Article 5/A of the Turkish Commercial Code, Law No. 6102).
Under Provisional Article 11(2), failing to meet the transfer requests of customers of a platform that chose liquidation or did not apply to the Board is itself the offence of unlicensed crypto services. Communiqué III-35/B.1 requires a liquidating platform to stop new business within fifteen days, inform customers and meet their conversion and transfer requests; assets of customers who make no request within a month of notice are converted to cash and sent to their bank accounts. If a platform has collapsed or you were drawn into a fake exchange or investment scheme, a criminal complaint and an early request for seizure usually need to run alongside the civil claim; our article on fighting back against investment scammers in Türkiye explains the steps, and our banking and finance law team acts in disputes with Turkish platforms and banks.
Yes, owning and trading crypto is lawful, but using it to pay for goods or services has been prohibited since 30 April 2021, and service providers need a Capital Markets Board licence.
The Capital Markets Board, under Articles 35/B and 35/C of Law No. 6362; MASAK sets the anti money laundering rules, and BDDK only approves banks acting as custodians.
A foreign platform that targets residents of Türkiye without a licence is treated as unlicensed and its website can be blocked; the offence is the provider's, but you lose the Turkish protections.
Under MASAK Communiqué No. 29, withdrawals to unregistered wallets or foreign providers outside the data sharing rules may be made only 48 hours after purchase, swap or deposit, or 72 hours for a first withdrawal.
Yes, 3,000 US dollars a day and 50,000 US dollars a month in equivalent value for stablecoins, which may be doubled where full verified sender data accompanies the transfer.
Always when you open an account, and for occasional transactions and transfers of 30,000 Turkish Lira or more since 7 October 2026.
No crypto specific tax is in force, as the March 2026 proposals were removed from the bill; general income tax rules may still apply depending on your activity and residence.
No. They are outside deposit insurance under Article 63 of Law No. 5411 and investor compensation under Article 82 of Law No. 6362, though they are segregated from the platform's own assets.
Customer cash and crypto assets cannot be attached or included in the platform's bankruptcy estate (Article 35/C(7)), and staff who embezzle them face eight to fourteen years' imprisonment.
Yes, for up to 48 hours under Article 128/A in listed fraud cases, longer if a judge orders seizure, and it may restrict accounts involved in market abuse under Article 35/C(3).
No. The Central Bank regulation prohibits the direct or indirect use of crypto assets in payments.
Three to five years' imprisonment and a judicial fine of 5,000 to 10,000 days under Article 109/A of Law No. 6362.
First to the platform's complaints unit in writing, then to the Capital Markets Board; money claims go to the consumer arbitration committee or the courts depending on value and status.
As of October 2026, crypto in Türkiye is lawful to hold and trade but not to pay with. Platforms and custodians need a Capital Markets Board licence under Law No. 6362 as amended by Law No. 7518, with TÜBİTAK setting technical criteria and existing platforms still in an extended transition. MASAK requires identification and travel rule data at 30,000 Turkish Lira, 48 and 72 hour waits for certain withdrawals and stablecoin limits, platforms can suspend accounts for 48 hours in fraud cases, and no crypto specific tax has been enacted.
If a platform has frozen your account, refused a withdrawal, lost assets in a security breach or is going into liquidation, or if you plan to set up a crypto business in Türkiye, we can assess the platform's status, preserve evidence and choose the right forum. To discuss your case, contact our legal team.
Documents referenced in this article, free to download.
Current Crypto Currency Laws under Turkish LawDownload
