Crypto license in Panama

What is legal today

Buying, holding, selling and transferring crypto are not prohibited in Panama, and no statute makes them so. What does not exist is the other half of the picture: a license, a register, or a regulator with jurisdiction over crypto as such. Crypto is not legal tender and is not an authorized means of payment. Panama uses the US dollar as its circulating currency, which is part of why proposals to give crypto a payment role have run into objections about the monetary system rather than about crypto itself.

The license being sold does not exist

Search for a Panama crypto license and you will find a dozen firms offering one, usually at a fixed price with a timeline attached. None of them is describing a Panamanian authorization, because there is not one to describe. Several go further and cite a legal basis that never came into being.

The most common version invokes "Law 697". Proyecto de Ley 697 de 2021 was approved in third debate by the Asamblea Nacional on 28 April 2022. President Cortizo partially vetoed it on 17 June 2022, saying it needed to be squared with the rules governing Panama's financial system and monetary model and with Financial Action Task Force recommendations. The Asamblea approved a new text on 28 October 2022, and the Executive took the view that this had ignored the constitutional procedure for a partial objection, because the new text altered articles that had never been objected to and added others that had not existed at all. Rather than sign it, the President asked the Supreme Court to declare the bill unconstitutional: articles 34 and 36 on substance, and the entire bill on form. It never entered into force. There is no Law 697.

Another version names a "Panama Financial Innovation Authority", sometimes given as AFIP, as the issuing body. No such institution exists. Panama's financial supervisors are the Superintendencia de Bancos, the Superintendencia del Mercado de Valores, the Superintendencia de Seguros y Reaseguros and the Superintendencia de Sujetos no Financieros, with the Unidad de Analisis Financiero as the financial intelligence unit. Not one of them licenses crypto.

A flat fee quoted for a Panama crypto license buys company formation, a compliance manual and an opinion letter. Those can be worth having. They are not a license, and a bank or counterparty that asks to see your Panamanian authorization cannot be shown one.

The anti-money-laundering position, precisely

This is where the marketing is most persuasive, because it is half right. Panama does have a serious anti-money-laundering regime: Law 23 of 27 April 2015, administered through the Unidad de Analisis Financiero and the sectoral supervisors. What it does not contain is a virtual asset category.

The Unidad de Analisis Financiero publishes its own consolidated text of Law 23, updated June 2026. Across roughly 115,000 characters, the words virtual, cripto, token and blockchain do not appear once. Article 22 sets out the financial obligated subjects as a closed list: banks and banking groups, trust companies, finance companies, leasing and factoring companies, card issuers and processors, issuers of means of payment and electronic money, money remitters, exchange houses, and three state banks. Article 23 hands the non-financial obligated subjects to article 40 of Law 124 of 2020, supervised by the Superintendencia de Sujetos no Financieros, whose sectors are free zones, casinos, real estate and construction, and regulated professionals.

So the accurate statement is narrower than "crypto businesses must register with the UAF", and more useful. A crypto business in Panama sits inside the anti-money-laundering perimeter when what it actually does falls into one of those existing categories, and outside it when it does not. An operator holding and moving customer funds may well be a money remitter. A fiat to crypto conversion desk may look like an exchange house. A payment token issuer may be an issuer of electronic money. Those are legal determinations worth taking advice on, not a form to file.

What is being proposed

Three attempts, none of them law.

Bill 697 died between a veto and the Supreme Court, as above.

On 7 August 2025 diputado Gabriel Solis filed an anteproyecto creating a framework for the supervision, registration and control of virtual asset service providers, developed, he said, in dialogue with the Superintendencia de Bancos, the Superintendencia del Mercado de Valores, fintech organizations, blockchain associations and international experts. His stated reason is the thing actually worth watching: Panama's next Financial Action Task Force evaluation falls in 2027, and a country with no virtual asset framework goes into that evaluation exposed. The anteproyecto became Bill 247.

On 13 January 2026 diputado Ernesto Cedeno filed Anteproyecto 314, a wider fintech framework law creating separate licenses for virtual asset service providers, payment service providers and electronic money issuers, formalizing a regulatory sandbox and setting penalties of up to two million dollars, with the Superintendencia de Bancos as supervisor.

The Asamblea's own account of the 28 January 2026 subcommittee session on Bill 247 states the obstacle plainly. Solis warned that several bills address virtual asset providers, licensing regimes and tax treatment without proper harmonization between them. Private sector participants argued that tax treatment belongs in the statute itself rather than in later administrative regulation, and others questioned whether the institutions being handed supervision have the technical capacity to exercise it.

That is a better forecast than any date. The obstacle is not opposition to regulating crypto. It is that Panama has several competing answers and no agreed one.

What a founder actually does

Incorporate a sociedad anonima, obtain the Aviso de Operacion that lets a business trade, and take advice on whether any article 22 category catches the specific activity. Then budget for the banking relationship rather than for a license. A Panamanian bank account is the step that decides whether the plan works at all, and it is granted on the bank's own risk appetite rather than on any authorization the business can obtain.