Many Vietnamese blockchain companies have ventured overseas, proven their capabilities and achieved a certain degree of success.

Yet despite being born in Vietnam, they face considerable difficulties operating in their home market. As a result, most have established their headquarters abroad.

How can they bring their resources and expertise back to serve the Vietnamese market? That remains a major question for Nguyen Thanh Trung, founder of Sky Mavis, Vietnam’s first Web3 technology unicorn, which was valued at nearly $3 billion in 2021.

Trung raised the issue at Conviction 2026, a technology event in Ho Chi Minh City that opened on August 14.

He noted that Vietnam is home to many blockchain companies, yet they effectively “do not play on their home turf, only away from home.”

This creates its own difficulties. Without a genuine home base, support system or domestic market to anchor their operations, Vietnamese companies can find it much harder to compete and win internationally.

“Sky Mavis has many activities involving overseas markets as well as fundraising. Whenever we think about coming home and how we could return to Vietnam, it is always something that weighs on us,” Trung said.

To encourage blockchain companies, and Vietnamese technology startups more broadly, to return home, Trung put forward several proposals.

First, Vietnam needs to address the question of how a company can be established domestically and receive investment from abroad within a short period - ideally no more than a month.

At present, he said, accomplishing this in Vietnam is extremely difficult because the country’s legal framework differs significantly from those overseas.

For example, if a company wants to raise capital from private investors through a SAFE agreement - an instrument providing rights to future equity that is not debt and carries neither a maturity date nor interest - Vietnamese law currently does not provide a corresponding framework.

A company therefore has to examine each element of an overseas SAFE agreement and restructure it to comply with Vietnamese law.

The process also requires investors to assess whether the arrangement is compatible with international arbitration rules, adding considerable time.

Transferring money into Vietnam is another complicated process because the investment has to go through foreign direct investment procedures. This can ultimately require a business to establish an overseas company before bringing the capital into Vietnam.

“At that point, all the advantages that matter - speed, competitiveness, the ability to access capital quickly and bring that money into Vietnam to serve the market or pay engineers here - become extremely difficult to realize,” Trung said.

He believes Vietnam’s emerging International Financial Center, or IFC, could offer a way to address the problem.

If, for example, a foreign investor were able to invest directly in an IFC member company through procedures completed within two to four weeks, the obstacle could effectively be removed. Once capital can be brought into Vietnam efficiently, companies would find it much easier to deploy resources domestically.

Trung’s second proposal concerns the valuation of intellectual property held by blockchain technology companies.

When a company returns to Vietnam, it may want to bring intellectual property rights, including source code and other intangible assets, back with it. At present, however, there is no mechanism for valuing such intellectual property assets.

That means companies cannot use them to access financial instruments and capital, even through the five crypto-asset exchanges that the Vietnamese government is expected to license under an upcoming pilot scheme.

Overseas, meanwhile, decentralized exchange mechanisms can provide ways for businesses to use such assets to secure financing for their operations.

Vietnam is taking a more controlled approach. While this offers greater safeguards, blockchain companies seeking to return also need services from centralized exchanges in Vietnam that can support asset valuation.

Clear regulations on how these intellectual property assets can be valued are therefore essential, Trung argued.

This could also create an opportunity for Vietnam’s first licensed crypto-asset exchanges to provide a broader range of services, expanding the domestic market while meeting the needs of blockchain technology companies seeking to bring crypto assets and other intangible assets back to Vietnam and record them on the balance sheets of their Vietnamese entities.

Le My