Blockchain and Web3 companies under Türkiye's export incentives

Companies building on blockchain usually expect to be an awkward fit for a government support programme. The pattern elsewhere is that the rules were written before the sector existed, so eligibility becomes an argument.

That is not the position here. Article 5 of the implementing circular sets out which IT companies the Standard Programme supports, and the list opens with blockchain, before artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, big data, smart city and other commercial software, embedded software, digital games, mobile applications, communication services and IT services.

So the eligibility question is settled in the rules rather than by interpretation. What is left is working out which items map onto how your company spends money.

Reaching users abroad

The largest item for most software companies is promotion of the product itself. Article 17 of the Decision covers advertising, promotion and marketing aimed at overseas audiences for a specific piece of software, at 50%, rising to 70% where it targets one of the Ministry's target countries.

The caps are 50,000,000 TL a year and 15,000,000 TL per product, which is about $314,000 of support on one product at roughly 47.7 TRY to the dollar. Up to ten products qualify in a year.

For a Web3 company this covers the same spending any software company does: paid acquisition, sponsored content, campaigns aimed at users in specific countries. The conditions are the ordinary ones. The promotion has to point at audiences outside Türkiye, social placements have to be sponsored rather than organic, and search engine optimisation sits outside the item.

Infrastructure

Article 16 covers server, cloud and hosting costs incurred to deliver your product to users abroad, at 50%, capped at 5,000,000 TL a year, about $105,000 of support covering roughly $210,000 of spending.

The item is defined by what the spending does rather than by who issues the invoice, so managed cloud, dedicated servers and infrastructure providers all sit on the same terms. What the file needs is an invoice addressed to your Turkish company, payment from its own account, and something showing the product is available to users in foreign markets.

One condition applies only to this item, and it should inform any decision to localise: if the product also has a Turkish-language version, support is calculated on half the payment rather than the full amount.

Audits and certification

Article 7 covers certificates, accreditations and audits obtained for overseas markets, at 50% up to 4,000,000 TL a year, about $84,000.

Security audits are close to a precondition for selling to institutional users in most markets, and companies in this sector often run several a year across different scopes and providers. Where those are obtained to make the product acceptable in foreign markets, they are the kind of overseas market entry requirement the item was written for.

Where the sector's spending is unusual

Two lines look different from a typical software company, and both change which items carry the weight.

Infrastructure runs heavier and more continuously than it does for an app business. Running nodes, indexers and RPC endpoints across several chains is a permanent cost rather than one that scales with users, and it starts before there is much revenue. That makes the hosting item unusually valuable early, when a company is spending without earning.

Audits recur rather than happening once. A contract audit before launch, another after a significant upgrade, and periodic reviews as the product changes means the certification item is used repeatedly instead of at a single point, which is closer to how a hardware company uses it than how a mobile studio does.

Both of those are ordinary claims. They just sit in different proportions from the pattern the guidance usually assumes.

Platform commissions and everything else

If your product is distributed through app stores or platforms that take a cut of overseas sales, Article 22 covers those commissions at 50%, up to 20,000,000 TL a year and 4,000,000 TL per product. Where a platform deducts its share from revenue rather than invoicing you, the deducted amount can still be claimed.

Beyond that, the ordinary items apply in the ordinary way: software licences, market research and database subscriptions, trade fair participation, salary support for commercial hires, and overseas office costs if you open one.

A worked year

Take a company running a live product with users across Europe, North America and East Asia:

• $520,000 on paid acquisition and campaigns aimed at those markets
• $180,000 on cloud and node infrastructure serving those users
• $70,000 on two security audits and a compliance certification
• $40,000 on software licences and data subscriptions

Most of the target markets are on the Ministry's list, so acquisition largely runs at the higher 70% rate rather than 50%, returning around $340,000 against a per-product cap of about $314,000, which is the figure that binds.

Infrastructure returns $90,000 at 50%, comfortably inside its own cap. The audits return $35,000. Licences and subscriptions return $20,000 between them, subject to the providers appearing on the relevant approved lists.

That is roughly $459,000 back on $810,000 of spending, in a year where the company changed nothing about what it was already doing. The per-product advertising cap is the only limit that bites, and it is the reason companies at this scale eventually look at the Branding Programme, where the same figure rises to 25,000,000 TL.

The question to settle first

The programme is built around one idea: a company resident in Türkiye supplying software or services to people and organisations abroad. Every item follows from that.

For a company with a product, users and revenue, the mapping is straightforward and looks like any other software business. Where it needs thought is where the structure is unusual, where there is no clear seller, no clear customer, or where the entity that would claim is not the entity that owns the product and holds the accounts.

That is a question about how the business is arranged rather than about blockchain, and it is much cheaper to work through before the Turkish company is set up than afterwards. It is also the part of this we spend the most time on with companies in this sector.

Anything about licensing or regulatory permissions for a specific activity sits alongside the incentives rather than inside them, and needs its own advice. The trade support side is concerned with whether you export software and services.

The calculator will show what the items above are worth against your own spending, and each payment you make carries its own six-month filing window, so the sooner the company exists the more of this year's spending it captures.