How to buy US stocks from Vietnam (checked November 2026)
Vietnamese individuals have no legal route to US stocks through a broker; Decree 135/2015 only opens the door for employee share plans. Binance and Bybit both sell real shares now, and Bybit takes Vietnamese dong by bank transfer. On the legal side, a penalty clause for trading on unlicensed platforms has existed since September 2026, but so far no individual has been fined and none of the three exchanges restricts Vietnamese users, much like the situation in China. This page lays out the rules, what each of the three exchanges offers, how to deposit and what the tax picture looks like.
| Exchange | Official status | Checked |
|---|---|---|
| Binance | Not listed as restricted | · source |
| OKX | Not listed as restricted | · source |
| Bybit | Not listed as restricted | · source |
- ID documents
- CCCD chip ID card or passport
- Deposit channels
- P2P (buy USDT from other users) · Bank transfer
- Regulation
- The Digital Technology Industry Law took effect in January 2026. Decree 284/2026 added, from 1 September, a penalty clause for trading on unlicensed platforms, but no pilot licence (at most 5) had been issued and no individual had been fined by late October 2026; none of the three exchanges holds a Vietnamese licence.
1. Why you can’t buy US stocks in Vietnam
It isn’t a technical problem. It’s foreign exchange law. Article 5 of Decree 135/2015 is blunt: a Vietnamese individual may make indirect investments abroad in exactly one form, by joining a foreign company’s employee share plan. Open an account with a local broker and the app only lists Vietnamese shares. Try to wire money to a US broker and your bank has no legal basis to process it. In June 2026, Nguyen Thanh Ha, a lawyer at SBLAW, told Dan Tri that no regulation currently allows an individual to move money abroad on their own to buy securities. Opening an account with a foreign broker solves the technical step of placing an order. It does not make the investment legal under Vietnamese law.
So you’ll find two camps online. One is promotional content from foreign brokers like Interactive Brokers and eToro saying “Vietnamese people can open an account too”. That’s true. The account does open. The other camp is financial media and lawyers saying the transfer step is illegal, the tax is on you to declare, and if something goes wrong Vietnamese regulators can’t help. Neither camp is wrong. They’re just talking about different things.
There is only one legal local substitute: the handful of licensed Vietnamese funds that hold overseas assets. You buy them in dong and never move money yourself. The downside is you can’t pick individual stocks and you don’t receive dividends. Several local brokers say they’re working on products with international partners. As of October 2026 none has launched.
Crypto exchanges are the third route. You buy USDT or USDC with dong first, then buy US stocks inside the exchange. The money never leaves the country labelled “buying stocks”, so it sidesteps the foreign exchange approval. But a different law does touch it, covered in section 3.
2. Which exchange works
The table above already shows it: Vietnam isn’t on any of the three official restricted lists. But that list is only about accounts. When it comes to the actual US stock products, the three differ a lot.
Bybit is currently the smoothest option for Vietnamese users. Its real stock product launched on 12 October 2026 and Vietnam isn’t on its unavailable list. It takes Vietnamese dong by direct bank transfer, no P2P needed, and its KYC accepts Vietnam’s chip-based CCCD identity card. What you need to avoid is its xStocks tokenized shares: the official FAQ lists Vietnam among the excluded regions, and the app shows an unavailable message when you tap in. Stock perpetuals don’t exclude Vietnam, but that’s a different animal and not for beginners.
Binance has the deepest dong P2P market of the three, with the most merchants and the tightest spreads, and Binance itself has a Vietnamese interface. The problem is where its real stocks and bStocks are available: Binance publishes no country list, only the phrase “eligible regions”, so whether a Vietnamese user sees the entry point is something you find out after signing up. Another signal: from March 2026 onward, Binance’s Vietnam-based staff left the local communities one by one, and the company has been hiring a Vietnam country manager remotely ever since. That doesn’t mean the product won’t work, but it does mean Binance is in wait-and-see mode on Vietnam. Also, on 30 October 2026 Binance suffered the largest theft in crypto history. It began restoring withdrawals in phases from 1 November and says it has covered 95% of user losses. Once you’ve bought your stocks, don’t leave idle USDC sitting on the exchange for long.
OKX has no real stocks, only xStocks tokens and stock perpetuals. xStocks are open in Southeast Asia, Vietnam included. In April 2026 OKX announced a strategic investment in CAEX, a Vietnamese licence applicant, alongside VPBankS and HashKey Capital. It’s the only one of the three that has put money on Vietnam’s licensing track. That changes nothing about buying US stocks today, but if Vietnam does issue licences, OKX-linked products may be the first to become compliant.
My advice: if you want real shares to hold, open Bybit. If you only want tokenized stocks and don’t care about dividends, Bybit won’t work for you, so use OKX or try Binance. You can open all three at once. Each KYC takes about half an hour.
3. What Vietnamese law says
This part is about the rules. The short version: the text is strict, enforcement so far hasn’t touched individuals, and that’s how it goes in most countries.
Timeline
- June 2025: the National Assembly passed the Law on Digital Technology Industry, the first law to recognise crypto assets as a form of property. It took effect on 1 January 2026.
- 9 September 2025: Government Resolution 05/2025 launched a crypto asset market pilot lasting five years. Only Vietnamese companies can apply, foreign ownership is capped at 49%, paid-in capital must be 10 trillion dong, and at most five licences will be issued.
- 20 January 2026: the Ministry of Finance started accepting licence applications. By March it had received seven.
- 27 March 2026: Ministry of Finance Circular 32/2026 took effect. Individuals pay 0.1% personal income tax on the value of every transfer made on a licensed Vietnamese platform, profit or loss.
- 4 May 2026: TCEX (the Techcombank affiliate) became the first applicant to clear the first round of review.
- 16 July 2026: the Government issued Decree 284/2026 setting administrative penalties for the crypto asset sector, effective 1 September.
- 23 October 2026: Tuoi Tre reported that all five applicants (VIXEX, SCEX, CAEX, TCEX and Moonbase) had passed preliminary review, and that CAEX had completed its level-4 information security assessment, met the capital requirement and was waiting for its licence. The State Securities Commission said the opening date “depends on the companies’ progress”. As of this page’s check date, no licence has been issued.
What Decree 284 means for you
Article 9 of the decree: a domestic investor who trades crypto assets other than through an institution licensed by the Ministry of Finance faces a fine of 30,000,000 to 50,000,000 dong. It took effect on 1 September, and there is still not a single licensed institution. Read literally, the article could cover anyone trading on an overseas exchange. But what the text says and what actually gets enforced are two different things.
As of the check date, I found no public case of an individual being fined under it, and none of the three exchanges has shut out or restricted Vietnamese users. A July report in VietNamNet quoted industry figures expecting exchanges to restrict Vietnamese users themselves once the decree took effect, but by early November that hadn’t happened. It looks a lot like China: the paperwork says no, individuals buying and selling on their own are left alone, and regulators spend their energy on platforms and large money flows.
I’m not a lawyer. The rules are laid out here as written. Given how enforcement has gone so far, the real risk for an individual trading small amounts is low. If you want to be completely at ease, waiting for a domestic licence before you start is fine too.
Tax
Two layers. On a licensed Vietnamese platform, the platform withholds 0.1%. On an overseas exchange nobody withholds anything, but the lawyers are clear: a Vietnamese tax resident’s foreign income, including US stock dividends and trading gains, must be declared, and holding the account on a foreign platform changes nothing. In practice almost nobody declares. That’s a description of reality, not a recommendation.
4. How to deposit
Bybit is the easiest. After completing Vietnamese KYC, open Deposit in the app, choose VND and bank transfer, and send dong to the account shown. The official help page lists the limits: the first deposit is capped at 25,000,000 dong, the second and third at 50,000,000 each, and after that whatever the input field shows. Once it lands, convert the dong to USDC in the app, since Bybit’s real stocks only settle in USDC.
Binance and OKX have no direct dong deposit, so you go through P2P: pick a merchant in the P2P market, transfer dong from a bank account in your own name, and the merchant releases the coins. The mainstream rails are Napas bank transfer and VietQR, and some merchants take MoMo or ZaloPay. Once you have USDT, swap it for USDC on Binance before buying stocks (Binance also takes USDT and BNB directly).
The P2P risk isn’t at the exchange. It’s your bank account. In June 2026 Tuoi Tre reported several cases of sellers whose accounts were frozen by police after receiving money that traced back to scams. The coins were already released and the cash was locked. Tran Xuan Tien, general secretary of the Ho Chi Minh City Blockchain Association, offered four rules worth following: trade only inside the exchange’s platform, never off-platform; accept payment only from an account whose name matches the buyer’s KYC; refuse third-party payments; and keep transfer receipts and chat logs. I’d add one of my own: put only the order number in the transfer memo, never words like USDT or crypto.
5. Four steps
Using Bybit as the example. Each step has its own page with the details.