Xapo Bitcoin Custodian Will Soon Receive Banking License In Gibraltar

The Xapo Bitcoin custodian will soon receive a banking license in Gibraltar and it could become a “fully fledged bank” according to the British Overseas Territory Finance Minister Albert Isola as we are reading more in our latest bitcoin news.

Xapo is setting up a “fully-fledged bank” in Gibraltar and the crypto custodian is now in the final stages of getting a fully accredited institution license with the new bank expecting to serve clients in the emerging markets. Digital wallet and custody provider or Xapo Bitcoin custodian is set to win a banking license from Gibraltar as Finance Minister Albert Isola said:

 “Xapo have now established themselves in Gibraltar as a fully-fledged bank.”

He clarified that the company already has an e-money license in Gibraltar and is in the final stages of being granted the accredited institution license which will give it the powers of a regular bank. Isola said:

 “Xapo have been licensed [here] for some time, and obviously what happens when you get to know the jurisdiction—the regulator gets to know you—firms will always be extending their licenses to cover more and more different things. And that progressed to a full accredited institution license.”

Q: What do Bitcoin bulls Wences Casares and Michael Saylor have in common?
A: They both lost money in Argentinian currency collapses.

— Jameson Lopp (@lopp) October 13, 2020

The news came after the flurry of US crypto companies announced the banking charters while last week, Anchorage was awarded the first baking charter that was ever given to a crypto platform in the United States at the end of 209, while crypto exchange Kraken and financial services provider Avanti were also granted specialist state banking charters from Wyoming.  Xapo is one of the earliest BTC custodians and was established in 2013 by the Argentinean serial entrepreneur and BTC bull Wences Casares who now sits on the boards of PayPal and Facebook’s planned crypto offering Diem.

Xapo announced via a blog post that the platform will likely expand beyond BTC to become a digital bank and to expect a launch before the end of 2020. The new strategy has meant leaving the US market so it means that Xapo will be ending the services to US customers from March 2021. Instead, the company will focus on clients in emerging markets that have no access to international private banking services. Xapo was planning to stop US operations even earlier as it sold the custody business to Coinbase for $55 million while holding on to the exchange business which allows the consumers to buy and sell crypto as Casares said:

 “Serving the US market would require quite a lot of effort, time and investment, it would require a separate organization within Xapo to support it and it would still yield a worse product than what we can offer internationally.”