How Thai investors buy IOST: baht, Bitkub and the SEC rulebook

The short answer

If you live in Thailand, the simplest way to buy IOST is the IOST/THB market on Bitkub. You top up baht by PromptPay or bank transfer, place one order, and you hold IOST. The second option is Binance TH, which lists IOST only against USDT, so you swap baht for crypto first. Both exchanges hold licenses from Thailand’s Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC, ก.ล.ต.).

That license is not a formality. Since 2025, profits from selling crypto through SEC-licensed venues are exempt from personal income tax until the end of 2029, while the authorities have blocked several big foreign exchanges outright. For a Thai resident, the licensed route is both the legal one and the cheaper one at tax time. The rest of this guide explains the rules, the venues, the deposit rails and the quirks of the Thai IOST community, including the famous nickname เหรียญยาย.

Law, regulator and market practice

It helps to keep three layers apart: what the law says, what the regulator does with it, and how exchanges behave in practice. Mixing them up is how people end up on the wrong platform.

The law

Thailand regulates crypto under the Emergency Decree on Digital Asset Businesses B.E. 2561 (2018). Exchanges, brokers, dealers, fund managers, advisers, custodians and ICO portals each need their own license, and the Ministry of Finance grants it on the SEC’s recommendation. Running a digital asset business without one is a criminal offense. Since 1 April 2022, licensed operators may not help anyone use crypto as a means of payment, so Thai exchanges are places to trade, not to pay for coffee.

The regulator

The SEC keeps a public register of every licensed operator, and it is the first thing to check before you sign up anywhere. In 2025 it also added USDT and USDC to its list of approved cryptocurrencies. The SEC has been active in enforcement. It filed a criminal complaint against OKX and nine promoters in March 2025, then announced that five unlicensed foreign platforms would be blocked from 28 June 2025.

Exchange practice

Licensed Thai exchanges run their own identity checks. Bitkub, for example, verifies Thai nationals by Thai ID and foreign residents by passport plus a residence document, and it pays baht out only to a Thai bank account in your own name. They also decide which coins to list, and here the picture is narrow: of the licensed exchanges we could check, only Bitkub offers IOST against baht.

The seven SEC-licensed exchanges

The SEC license-check page lists seven companies licensed as digital asset exchanges: WaanX (Waan Exchange), Gulf Binance (Binance TH), TDX (Thai Digital Assets Exchange, part of the SET group), Upbit Exchange (Thailand), Z.comEX (GMO-Z.com Cryptonomics), Bitkub Online and Orbix Trade. A longer list of brokers and dealers also exists, including names such as INVX, Bitazza and Coins TH, but this guide focuses on the exchanges.

One name you might expect is missing. KuCoin Thailand, which launched in 2025 after taking over ERX, does not appear on the SEC list we checked, and its public API shows only seven baht pairs with no IOST. Do not treat it as licensed until the register says so. For Orbix, WaanX, TDX and Z.comEX we found no public market data, so we could not confirm whether they list IOST.

Where IOST actually trades in Thailand

Three licensed exchanges show IOST in their APIs, but only two of those markets are alive. Here is what we found when we checked each venue’s own data.

How deep is the Bitkub market? In relative terms, it is the largest IOST market in Southeast Asia that we could find. In our research snapshot, its daily IOST/THB turnover was roughly a tenth of Binance’s global IOST/USDT market and about ten times the size of any single Japanese yen market. That is enough for everyday retail orders, but a large order will still move the price, and the bid-ask spread on CoinGecko was above one percent when we looked. For the live baht rate, use the converter below or the IOST price page.

Upbit Thailand deserves a word, because the brand is huge in Korea, where Upbit runs one of the two biggest IOST markets in the world. The Thai arm lists only BTC-IOST, and the market showed no trades at all, with a last price of one satoshi. Treat it as a dormant listing, not a place to buy. If you want to read why Korean volume is so different, see our South Korea page.

One market does most of the work

Most Thai IOST activity flows through a single baht order book. That keeps things simple, but it also means one exchange’s fees, spread and withdrawal policy shape almost every Thai trade.

Bitkub or Binance TH?

Both venues are legal for Thai residents and both keep you inside the tax exemption. The difference is the number of steps. On Bitkub, baht buys IOST directly. On Binance TH, baht buys crypto and that crypto buys IOST, so you cross two spreads instead of one. Binance TH can still make sense if you already hold crypto there or want to compare prices.

A worked example makes the fee side concrete. If you spend 2,000 THB on IOST at Bitkub’s reported 0.25% fee, the trading fee is 5 THB. Bitkub’s minimum order on the IOST/THB pair is 10 THB, so even a tiny first purchase works. The spread, not the fee, is usually the bigger hidden cost on a thin pair, so use limit orders rather than market orders when you can. Our exchange comparison puts these numbers next to venues in other countries.

How to buy IOST with baht, step by step

The flow below assumes Bitkub, since it is the only direct baht route. The same logic applies to Binance TH with an extra crypto step. For a country-neutral version, see how to buy IOST.

1. Open and verify an account

   Thai nationals verify with a Thai ID through NDID or Dip-Chip, which can even be done at 7-Eleven. Foreign residents use a passport plus a residence document such as a pink ID card, work permit or non-immigrant visa. Accounts approved from 1 January 2025 had crypto withdrawals held until extra verification was finished, so complete every step early.

2. Deposit baht

   Use PromptPay QR or a transfer from a Thai bank account in your own name, for example KBank, SCB, Krungthai, Bangkok Bank or Krungsri. Bitkub does not charge for baht deposits.

3. Buy on the IOST/THB market

   Open the IOST/THB pair and place a limit order near the best offer. Check the order book first, because a market order on a thin pair can fill well above the last price.

4. Decide where to keep it

   Leave a small trading balance on the exchange, or withdraw to your own wallet. See IOST wallets for options, and always include the memo when sending IOST to another exchange.

Moving IOST between Thai exchanges is a common search, usually “Bitkub to Binance”. The key detail is the memo. Exchanges use one shared deposit account for IOST and tell users apart by a memo, so a transfer without it can disappear into the exchange’s account. Our guide to sending IOST covers memo mistakes and recovery. Bitkub’s IOST withdrawal fee and supported networks sit behind a bot check on its website, so we could not confirm them; look in the app before you send. Also check that both exchanges have IOST transfers open. Several exchanges paused IOST deposits and withdrawals for days around the v4.0.0 network upgrade in October 2026.

Tax: the 2025–2029 capital-gains exemption

Ministerial Regulation No. 399, published in the Royal Gazette on 5 September 2025, exempts individuals from personal income tax on gains from selling crypto or digital tokens. The key condition is the venue: the sale must go through an SEC-licensed exchange, broker or dealer. It covers transfers from 1 January 2025 to 31 December 2029.

The exclusions are just as important. Gains made on offshore or unlicensed platforms, through P2P deals or in DeFi do not qualify, and the exemption is for individuals, not companies. So if you buy IOST on Bitkub and later sell it back to baht on Bitkub, the gain sits inside the exemption. If you sell the same IOST on an unlicensed foreign app, it does not, and normal income tax rules apply. The Revenue Department is the authority on how those rules apply to you. This page is general information, not tax advice.

Bitkub and the IOST 3.0 airdrop

When IOST moved to its IOST 3.0 Layer 2 on BNB Chain, half of the 1.7056B IOST airdrop was allocated to exchanges, based on a snapshot taken at 00:00 UTC on 15 March 2025. Bitkub joined. According to Bitkub announcements reported in the trade press, users who held at least 1,000 IOST on Bitkub at the snapshot receive payouts. The first payout covered four months at once, and monthly payouts followed. The eleventh round was reported on 27 May 2026 and the twelfth on 30 June 2026.

Two practical points. First, you do not need to claim anything on Bitkub; the exchange credits eligible accounts. Second, IOST bought after the snapshot does not qualify, so the airdrop is no reason to buy now. Bitkub also has history here. It supported the first Donnie Finance (DON) airdrop to IOST holders, with a snapshot on 25 February 2021 at 11:30 Thai time. Anyone promising a “new Bitkub IOST airdrop” through a link or a DM is running a scam. Our airdrop guide explains how the official program works.

Why Thais call IOST “เหรียญยาย”

Spend five minutes in Thai crypto groups or on YouTube and you will see IOST called เหรียญยาย, “grandma coin”, sometimes เหรียญคุณยาย. It is also called เหรียญขวัญใจมหาชน, roughly “the people’s favorite coin”. The nickname is real and widespread, and it was already in use in a 2022 Blockdit post.

Where it comes from is less clear. The only explanation we found is a single social post from the Thai finance account Stocker Day in April 2024. It says the chart moves “slow life”: it rises slowly and falls at grandma speed. Other theories circulate, such as IOST being cheap enough for anyone’s grandmother or Thai retail holding it since the 2018 listing, but we found no source for them. What is verifiable is the long history: IOST/THB has been on Bitkub since November 2018 as one of its earliest pairs. On the IOST rich list, several large accounts named bkiost0x probably belong to Bitkub, though that label is our inference. For the wider IOST story, read what IOST is.

Offshore apps, CEX.IO and what being unlicensed means

On 28 June 2025, the Ministry of Digital Economy and Society began blocking access to Bybit, OKX, CoinEx, XT.COM and 1000X under the technology-crime decree, after the SEC flagged them as unlicensed. Later cases followed, including a complaint over Vcex.io in October 2026. Vcex.io is a different company from CEX.IO, so do not confuse the two.

CEX.IO, a long-running exchange founded in 2013, was not among the blocked platforms and still accepts Thai sign-ups on paper. It holds no SEC Thailand license, and Asian users contract with CEX OVRS LLC in Nevis, which holds no Asian license. For a Thai resident that has two consequences. Trading there is trading on an unlicensed foreign platform, and gains made there do not get the 2025–2029 tax exemption. CEX.IO also does not list IOST, offers no PromptPay, and funds by card in USD, EUR or GBP, so a Thai card is converted at bank rates.

Our advice is simple. If you live in Thailand, use Bitkub or Binance TH. The offshore card route is mainly useful for people outside Thailand, or visitors who do not have a Thai bank account. They can buy crypto by card, move it to an exchange that lists IOST, and buy there.

Not a Thai resident? Grab crypto first

CEX.IO does not list IOST. Visitors and people abroad can buy crypto with a card there, send it to an exchange that lists IOST, and swap. Thai residents should stay on SEC-licensed venues.

Grab crypto, then IOST

CEX.IO is not licensed by Thailand’s SEC. Trades on SEC-licensed exchanges such as Bitkub may qualify for Thailand’s capital-gains tax exemption; trades elsewhere do not.

Tourists have one more option on paper. In August 2025, the Ministry of Finance, the SEC and the Bank of Thailand announced an 18-month sandbox, TouristDigiPay. It lets foreign visitors convert crypto to baht through a licensed operator and spend it by QR code at merchants, with no cash withdrawals. We could not confirm how widely it operates or which operators take part, so check before you rely on it.

Local risks to keep in mind

Exchange concentration. Bitkub is the baht market for IOST, so its governance matters. In July 2026, the SEC was reported to have filed a criminal complaint against Bitkub Online and two former directors. The complaint concerns net-capital reports from 2021 that allegedly hid a theft of about 1.7 billion baht. Bitkub says its co-founders replaced the stolen assets and that no client lost money. Our Bitkub review covers the case in detail.

Fake promoters. The SEC has gone after people promoting unlicensed exchanges, not only the exchanges themselves. If a Facebook group, LINE chat or influencer pushes an app that is not on the register, that is a red flag. Fake IOST airdrops, look-alike BEP-20 tokens and “support” DMs are common too; our IOST safety guide lists the patterns.

Vcex.io is not CEX.IO. Check the SEC register!

Price risk. The nickname is a joke, but the chart is not. IOST trades more than 99% below its January 2018 high, and sharp spikes in 2026 retraced within days. Size your position for that, and read our price outlook for the factors that move it. For how Thailand compares with its neighbors, the IOST in Asia hub lines up every country, and our Indonesia page shows a market where the tax rules work very differently.