Monex Inc, the company that recently hacked Japanese crypto exchange Coincheck, has revealed plans to expand the exchange to the U.S. in an with Bloomberg today, May 18.
Monex CEO Oki Matsumoto said he expects Coincheck will receive an official license from Japanese authorities next month, but – without specifying a timeframe – he revealed the company now has its sights beyond Asia:
“Japan may seem like it’s one step ahead in crypto, but in terms of deciding what’s a security or a token and attracting institutional investors, the U.S. and Europe are moving ahead.”
Japan has long been at the vanguard of crypto adoption – the country was the first to recognize bitcoin as a back in 2016 – but Matsumoto considers that the U.S. and Europe have now taken the edge in terms of crypto-specific regulatory momentum. He compared Japan’s hefty levy tax on crypto with France’s to tax crypto at a favorable capital gains rate of 19 percent, telling Bloomberg that:
“At [Japan’s] level, it’s hard to even think of crypto as something you’d put in your portfolio. That means it’ll just remain a plaything for speculators.”
More crucially still, the CEO argued that U.S. federal regulators now wield the biggest influence on deciding the future status of crypto in the world economy, referring to the ongoing as to whether digital assets should be regulated as or commodities. An eventual decision would provide much-needed clarity for the emerging industry, and ultimately foster and , he told Bloomberg.
Monex’s decision to target overseas markets is the latest in a series of upheavals in Coincheck’s checkered history since its unprecedented hack in Jan. 2018. Coincheck was subsequently by Monex in April, with the latter’s shares surging 98 percent since the acquisition, according to Bloomberg.
released by Monex showed that notwithstanding the mammoth post-hack writedown that Coincheck issued as a to affected customers, the exchange still closed the fiscal year in the green, netting ¥6.3 bln (about $56.7 mln) revenue on sales of ¥62.6 bln.
Earlier this month, Japan’s Financial Services Agency (FSA), yet further stipulations for the regulatory that have been imposed on the country’s crypto exchanges. An FSA source nonetheless judged that the crypto regulatory process in Japan has been unfolding "without the necessary know-how – we been feeling our way through the dark.”
Published at Fri, 18 May 2018 10:12:28 +0000
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