Recently we prepared a memorandum for a major international organization related to data protection in Vietnam. It serves as a really good overview of the issue of how to treat data, both personal and corporate, and as such, I would like to include a version of that document here. What follows is a redacted and [...]
Know Your Customer, or KYC, is a process of identification and verification of customer information by financial entities[1] in accordance with the prevention and combating of money laundering and financing of terrorism. For KYC in Vietnam, financial entities must apply measures to identify customers in the following cases: When a customer initially opens an account [...]
Vietnam's startup darling Axie Infinity is in the news. Like the United States on the back of trillions of dollars of newly printed dollar bills, Axie Infinity is suffering from a classic economic problem: inflation. Here's the skinny. Axie Infinity is a blockchain item, based on Ethereum, where it uses a couple of different technologies. [...]
Credit information is defined as “related data, figures, datum of borrowers in the participating organizations of a credit information company”, and credit information services provision refers to the provision of credit information products by credit information companies to its users on the basis of collecting, processing, and storing credit information. Credit information products are created [...]
Banking is a big business in Vietnam with 4 state-owned commercial banks, 31 joint-stock commercial banks, 2 joint-venture banks, 52 branch offices of foreign banks, 60 representative offices, 16 financial companies and 9 foreign banks[1]. According to an Austrade Report (2020), 78 banks offer internet payment solutions. Mobile payment is available at 47 banks, and [...]
On 28 October 2021, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO and majority shareholder of Facebook (now Meta apparently) announced this thing called the Metaverse, a ripped off concept from countless science fiction books that, according to Wikipedia, is: a hypothesized iteration of the Internet, supporting persistent online 3-D virtual environments[1][2][3] through conventional personal computing, as well as virtual and augmented reality headsets. The idea, then, is to [...]
In the middle of writing about Sky Mavis and NFTs and cryptocurrency the Ministry of Public Security issued a draft decree related to cybersecurity. I didn't get the chance to write about this earlier, but I think it is important enough--as it offers some guidance on questions related to the Law on Cybersecurity of 2018--to [...]
This week I had the opportunity to edit our new legal guide for technology transfer in Vietnam. It was prepared by Yen Pham, a lawyer on our staff, and I thought I would give a preview of some of its contents as it is related to my practice. Some Basics of Technology Transfer Technology transfer [...]
All right, one more blog post about cryptocurrency. A little over a week ago, the Ho Chi Minh City police announced they busted a major gambling ring (see article from Bloomberg here). They arrested 59 people and confiscated 40 laptops, over 70 cell phones, ATM cards, and over 130,000USD worth of Vietnamese Dong. The gambling [...]
I recently had a conversation with an official from the US Consulate here in Ho Chi Minh City, in which we discussed cryptocurrency and blockchain issues. On repeated occasions he asked the question: what makes blockchain different from a regular database? That got me thinking. There are certainly some instances in which there is no [...]