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SBI Launches Japan’s First Bank-Owned Cryptocurrency Exchange with Ripple Support

Sbi launches japan’s first bank-owned cryptocurrency exchange with ripple support

SBI Launches Japan’s First Bank-Owned Cryptocurrency Exchange with Ripple Support


Vctrade sbi
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Japanese financial institution SBI holdings has confirmed the launch of its cryptocurrency exchange, called ‘VCTRADE’, 15 months after its initial announcement in 2016.

In an announcement on Monday, the Japanese financial giant revealed it will initially focus on trading XRP, the native token powering Ripple’s Consensus Ledger (RCL), with upcoming support for bitcoin (BTC). While no timelines have been revealed, the cryptocurrency exchange has also earmarked support for bitcoin cash (BCH) in the future.

SBI Holdings is notably partnered with Ripple and jointly owns and operates SBI Ripple Asia, a company that has been actively exploring the use of Ripple’s blockchain in foreign exchange and money transfers among banks.

According to the announcement, there will be no transaction fees for XRP/JPY trading at launch. Users will be charged withdrawal fees at the time of retrieving Japanese yen, although the platform hasn’t revealed any further details.

The exchange will be available to some 20,000 pre-registered users at launch. A wider public rollout is expected next month in July 2018.

As reported by CCN in October 2016, SBI Holdings first established SBI Virtual Currencies, its wholly owned subsidiary.

“In recent years, virtual currencies, like bitcoin, have attracted plenty of interest and have been covered in major media,” SBI said at the time in its effort to become the country’s first bank-backed crypto exchange. “It [virtual currencies] are also being traded actively.”

Although completing its registration for a cryptocurrency exchange business with the Financial Services Agency (FCA – Japan’s financial regulato – in September 2017, the platform’s launch was postponed after SBI determined it had to further strengthen its cybersecurity safeguards prior to launch, earlier this year. SBI announced the delay a month after the infamous $530 million theft of NEM tokens from Tokyo-based cryptocurrency exchange Coincheck.

Already invested in bitFlyer, Japan’s biggest bitcoin exchange, SBI also announced a 40% ownership stake in Taiwanese crypto hardware wallet developer CoolBitX in March. While unconfirmed, the move could see the latter’s cold-wallet technology used by SBI to store customers’ crypto assets.

Featured image from Shutterstock.

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Published at Mon, 04 Jun 2018 11:47:03 +0000

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Here’s How SonoCoin Is Trying To Use Sound To Transfer Value

Companies are rushing to try and make peer to peer, blockchain based value transfer quicker and simpler right now and this company thinks it’s been able to do just that.


bitcoin just broke through a major resistance level and interest in the space has never been higher. Companies of all shapes and sizes are popping up, looking to take advantage of the rush to develop and establish the blockchain-centric infrastructure that’s going to serve as the foundation for technological advance for many years to come and many of these are conducting ICOs to try and pick up funding. The ICO space, however, and likely as a direct result of the above statement, is pretty crowded right now and a company that wants to stand out and – in turn – to attract investor capital through an initial offering has to serve up something unique. Reports have just hit press that a company called SonoCoin is about to launch its efforts to do just that and, at a glance, the company looks as though it certainly checks the ‘unique offering’ box.

SonoCoin has developed a blockchain based peer-to-peer value transfer system that uses a digitally encrypted audio file as its transfer token. In contrast to bitcoin, which uses a Proof-of-Work (PoW) protocol, SonoCoin uses a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) protocol to verify transactions and, again unlike bitcoin, the exchange token can be sent via any means through which a standard data/audio file can be sent – email, messenger application, etc.

So how does it work?

The company has developed an algorithm that takes a transaction hash, a secret key and the index (which is defined as the number of outputs when the coin was formed) and converts it into a .wav file.

This file can then be sent from one device to another (basically, so long as the devices have a microphone and a speaker that can emit, recognize and interpret sound, which pretty much all mobile devices do right now) and, on receipt, an application (which is already available for some devices) specifically designed to interpret these SonoCoin sound files will record and register the transaction.

And why is this news now?

The company is currently conducting a presale of its tokens and intends to move into the second phase of this presale on December 14, at the end of next week. During phase one and phase two (phase one has been active since this time last week), a total of 30 million coins will be issued. Subsequent to the presale, 40 million coins will be issued as part of the full ICO.

How successful the ICO will be remains to be seen but the assumption is that, post-completion, SonoCoin will look to pick up a listing for its coins on the major exchanges in the space – Bittrex, Poloniex, etc. and it’s at that point that we’ll really get an idea of the market appetite for this sort of alternative-format type value transfer.

Here’s the company’s Whitepaper for anyone looking to get a better idea of how SonoCoin works.

What do you think of this sort of application of blockchain technology? Will the ability to transfer value via sound files aid mainstream adoption of algorithm-based peer-to-peer transactions? Let us know in the comments section below!


Image courtesy of Tess Watson via Flickr

The post Here’s How SonoCoin Is Trying To Use Sound To Transfer Value appeared first on Bitcoinist.com.

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