Japan Sees The Launch Of The First Bank-Owned Cryptocurrency Exchange

After two years and months of delays, the first bank-owned cryptocurrency exchange is now live – seeing its public launch in Japan.

The news came after an official announcement where the Japanese giant SBI Holdings formally launched its cryptocurrency exchange platform dubbed ‘VCTRADE’.

As we reported earlier, SBI first planned to launch the exchange for a limited number of pre-registered users (20,000) who would enroll during an early alpha last year – holding off a potential public launch in Japan, which is one of the world’s largest crypto trading markets. The hold-off was mainly because of the complex registration and license issues issued by the Financial Services Agency (FSA), which is Japan’s financial regulatory.

Meanwhile, Japan’s policy states that every exchange must be licensed under regulatory laws. SBI Holdings, through its subsidiary SBI Virtual Currencies – which is the operator of VCTRADE – now began to accept applications from Japanese users for new accounts. The public launch will see the bank-backed cryptocurrency exchange to open its doors for all the residents between 20 and 70 years.

During the preliminary launch last month, VCTRADE initially supported XRP trading. After partnering with Ripple, the SBI Ripple Asia talked to the San Francisco-based FinTech giant in order to explore the application of Ripple’s blockchain tech and XRP in remittance flows among Asian markets.

In only a couple of weeks, VCTRADE added support for Bitcoin Cash (BCH/JPY) and Bitcoin (BTC/JYP) which marks a total of three cryptocurrencies that are supported so far on VCTRADE.