Colombia Crypto Regulation: Where the Bill Stands

A company weighing whether to pay Colombian contractors, collect from Colombian clients, or route treasury through Colombia in stablecoins usually asks one question first: is the legal ground stable? Search "Colombia crypto regulation" and the headlines contradict each other, some announcing a new law is coming, others implying Congress already passed one. Neither is accurate.

At Soulbit Academy we separate what an official source states from what is press speculation before we put a claim in front of a finance team. This piece does exactly that for Colombia's digital assets framework: what bill reached Congress and what happened to it, what second bill the government has drafted but not filed, and what already binds a company today regardless of either one.

Colombia has no digital assets law in force as of August 2026

As of August 2026, Colombia has no law that comprehensively regulates crypto assets, stablecoins, or the providers that offer services around them. Two separate legislative efforts exist, and neither is in force. One went through Congress and was archived. The other was drafted by the government and, based on available information, has not yet been formally filed.

That distinction matters for a foreign company assessing risk, because these are two different processes with two different histories, and conflating them produces wrong conclusions. The first already had its legislative shot and lost it. The second has not even started its run through Congress.

Why is there so much conflicting information about Colombia's crypto law?

Because two similar-sounding stories overlapped in time but are different in kind. One is coverage of a bill that genuinely advanced through the Chamber of Representatives during 2025. The other is coverage of a bill the government announced it had ready, without it ever being filed. Headlines do not always distinguish "a bill is moving" from "a bill was already shelved."

The bill that was archived: PL 510 of 2025

Bill 510 of 2025, which sought to regulate virtual asset service providers, was filed on February 25, 2025 and ended up archived before reaching the Senate. Ten congress members signed it, with Representative Julián David López Tenorio as lead author and floor sponsor, and Senator Gustavo Adolfo Moreno Hurtado among the cosigners. The Sixth Constitutional Standing Committee handled the process.

The 16-article text proposed a registry of virtual asset service providers run by the Superintendencia de Sociedades, compliance duties for those providers, a ban on platforms transferring, lending, or encumbering a user's assets without consent, and a prohibition on multilevel marketing schemes built around virtual assets. Its stated goal was to promote blockchain adoption in an orderly way.

The bill went further than most crypto bills in Colombia's legislative history. It was published in the Congressional Gazette on March 3, 2025, cleared its first debate on May 14, 2025, and its second-debate text was published on June 18, 2025. It received formal input from the Ministry of Finance in June 2025 and from Colombia Fintech in August 2025. Despite that progress, it never reached a Senate debate.

What exactly happened to Bill 510 of 2025?

It was archived. The Chamber of Representatives itself lists PL 510/2025C as archived under Article 190 of Law 5 of 1992, the rule that requires any bill to be shelved if it does not complete its process within the two ordinary legislative terms it was filed in. In practice, the bill cleared the Chamber but ran out of time to reach the Senate before that deadline. Colombian business outlets including Portafolio and Valora Analítik reported the archiving in August 2026, coinciding with that legal deadline.

This does not mean the substance is dead for good. Archiving for expired legislative term is a procedural close, not a rejection on the merits: any member of Congress can refile a similar bill in a future term. But as of this writing, no VASP bill is active in the Colombian Congress.

The other bill: the framework the government still has not filed

A second, separate and broader bill was drafted by the Ministry of Finance alongside other financial authorities, but as of August 2026 there is no record of it being formally filed in Congress. It originated in technical working groups under the Committee for Coordination and Monitoring of the Financial System, with input from the Superintendencia Financiera de Colombia, Fogafín, the Financial Regulation Studies and Projection Unit, the DIAN, and the Fiscalía General de la Nación.

Unlike Bill 510 of 2025, which focused on service providers, this framework would reportedly aim broader: rules covering cryptocurrencies, stablecoins, and tokens, with the Banco de la República playing a meaningful role for anything touching stablecoins, given their potential monetary impact. According to business press that reviewed a draft in early 2026, the text would not classify digital assets as currency, something the Banco de la República has repeatedly ruled out, but would instead treat them as asset representations subject to supervision.

Is a new comprehensive crypto bill actually moving through Colombia's Congress?

Not yet, and it should not be confused with the bill that was archived. This second bill is a separate government initiative, not a continuation of the shelved Chamber bill. Valora Analítik reported on February 25, 2026, that the text was in the hands of the Ministry of Finance and ready to be filed, but with no set date, given other legislative priorities. We were unable to confirm in an official source that it has been filed since. Anyone who needs the current status should check directly with minhacienda.gov.co or the Congressional Gazette.

That is why this article avoids the assertive future tense. We do not write that the law "will require" anything, because there is no filed bill with a final text to cite. What can be stated is that a documented government intent exists, with input from several authorities, and that its final shape will depend on what text gets filed, which committee it lands in, and what amendments it survives, if it is filed at all.

What already applies to a company operating in Colombia

While neither bill becomes law, a company operating with crypto assets in Colombia already has obligations in force before the UIAF and the DIAN. Several obligations already apply today, under rules that do not depend on either pending bill.

Obligation	Authority	Rule	In force since
Report suspicious virtual asset transactions	UIAF	Resolution 314 of 2021	April 2022
File tax information aligned to the international exchange standard	DIAN	Resolution 000240 of 2025	Tax year 2026
Treat the peso as the sole legal tender	Banco de la República	Existing monetary regime	No change
Declare crypto assets under general net-worth rules	DIAN	Tax Code (Estatuto Tributario)	No change

The UIAF has required certain obligated parties to report virtual asset transactions since April 2022, with defined thresholds per transaction and monthly accumulation. The DIAN, for its part, imposed a tax reporting duty aligned to the international exchange-of-information standard through Resolution 000240 of December 24, 2025, effective from tax year 2026. Neither rule needs the Ministry of Finance's bill to apply; both are already in force.

What does not exist is a license or a registration regime to operate as a virtual asset service provider in Colombia, nor a legal definition of what counts as a digital asset. That is precisely the gap both bills, the archived one and the pending one, were meant to fill. For the tax detail behind what already applies, see the DIAN and crypto assets for a company in Colombia, and for the foreign exchange angle, see Colombia's foreign exchange regime for companies.

The Financial Superintendency's pilot and what it showed

Between February 2021 and June 2024, the Superintendencia Financiera de Colombia ran a controlled pilot, known as La Arenera, that let seven alliances between supervised financial institutions and crypto exchange platforms test cash-in and cash-out operations in Colombian pesos through deposit products. The pilot closed in June 2024 with no incidents reported, according to the Superintendency's own closing summary.

That is a relevant data point for a foreign company assessing risk, because it shows Colombia's financial regulator already has direct, positive experience with banks and crypto platforms interacting, well before any law exists. The Superintendency's own release states the pilot's findings are expected to feed into the design of an appropriate regulatory framework for the sector, suggesting the pilot's output is already an input to the bills discussed above.

What did the financial regulator actually learn from that pilot?

That controlled cash-in and cash-out operations between banks and exchanges are technically workable without producing the risks that, for years, drove Colombian banks to avoid working with crypto platforms altogether. The closing release reports no incidents across more than three years of operation. That track record creates no permanent authorization or obligation, but it is a verifiable data point that runs against the narrative that Colombia's financial system is uniformly hostile to crypto platforms.

Where comparable frameworks are heading: MiCA, GENIUS, and the Travel Rule

Colombia is not an outlier in the region: the LATAM crypto regulation landscape 2026 shows closed frameworks in four countries and partial ones in five others. The three frameworks most cited in Colombia's own debate point to a general direction, useful for reading what kind of rules tend to appear once a country legislates on digital assets.

Framework	Jurisdiction	What it mainly regulates	Status
MiCA	European Union	Crypto asset issuance and service providers	In force since 2024
GENIUS Act	United States	Issuance and backing of payment stablecoins	In force since 2025
FATF Travel Rule	International standard adopted by member countries	Counterparty traceability in virtual asset transfers	Standing recommendation, uneven adoption

MiCA, the EU's markets-in-crypto-assets regulation, conditions stablecoin issuance and requires authorization for service providers operating in the bloc; the detail is in MiCA 2026: what it means for LATAM companies operating with Europe. The GENIUS Act, in the United States, focuses on backing and oversight for payment stablecoin issuers, covered in the GENIUS Act and stablecoins for LATAM companies. And the FATF Travel Rule, while not a law but an international recommendation, requires virtual asset service providers to share originator and beneficiary data on transfers, a standard Colombia has not yet explicitly incorporated into its current framework, as detailed in the FATF Travel Rule for companies operating with crypto assets.

If the Ministry of Finance's broader framework is eventually filed and passed, it would be reasonable to expect it to borrow from these three precedents: a registration or licensing regime for providers, some form of stablecoin oversight involving the Banco de la República, and eventually a more explicit Travel Rule implementation. That is a regional trend reading, not a prediction about the content of a text that does not yet exist.

What Soulbit V1 delivers today, without embellishment

Soulbit is not an authorized or registered virtual asset service provider in Colombia, because that registration category does not yet exist as a legal matter in the country. Verifying the regulatory status of any counterparty, Soulbit included, is the responsibility of each company and its legal advisors.

What the V1 delivers today is concrete: a business balance in USDC and USDT stablecoins, fiat in USD, EUR, and GBP, a local banking rail in Colombia, KYB verification, recurring and batch payroll, payment links, collection QR codes, quote-based conversion on request, institutional custody, and AML/KYT monitoring. These capabilities operate under the obligations already in force in Colombia today, such as UIAF and DIAN reporting described above, regardless of whether a comprehensive framework passes in the future.

What it does not deliver matters too. There are no cards, no yield or APY, no proprietary token, and no native mobile app until it is live on app stores. Nothing in this article should be read as legal advice or as a promise about the final content of a law that does not yet exist.