FX & Currencies
Binance CEO “Accidentally” Announces a Crypto Exchange In Singapore
17 Sept 2018
The crypto market is more alive than ever. And in the midst of all the pressure coming from the institutional spectrum, private investors an companies expand and thrive within its boundaries. The likes of Binance, taken as example, as it just announced it is planning to open a fiat-to-crypto exchange in Sinapore in the coming months.
The announced was made on September 15th, over the day two of the Cumberland Summit in Singapore. Changpeng “CZ” Zhao, co-founder and CEO of crypto exchange Binance, one of the world’s largest crypto exchange by traded volume, slipped out, apparently by accident, plans to launch a fiat-to-crypto exchange in Singapore. After the announced, he went even further and unfolded all his plans for the Asian city-state as was revealed that a close beta test would begin on September 18th.
Later that day, the Binance CEO admitted to his mistake on Twitter saying: “I just slipped that we will begin #Binance Singapore fiat exchange live money closed beta testing on Sept 18th, in 3 days. Invitation only first. Exciting!”
This means that it is quite likely that the Singapore exchange will be launched before the end of the year, and that it will be offering SGD/BTC and SGD/ETH trading pairs.
It is not too surprising to hear that Binance has chosen to launch in Singapore, a global financial hub with relatively low taxes, a tech-friendly atmosphere, and a reputation as a good place to launch ICOs; a few examples of ICOs launched in Singapore are TenX, Golem, and Qtum. Coinbase, Gemini, and Huobi already have a presence in Singapore. Also, foundations for Litecoin, TRON, and VeChain are based here.
Nonetheless, in June 2018, also Japan’s LINE Corporation announced that it was going to launch its own crypto exchange (called BITBOX) in Singapore; already operating in the country from 16 July 2018.
Binance’s move to open a crypto exchange in Singapore comes after Malta Today reported on 11 September 2018, that Binance had signed a memorandum of understanding with the Malta Stock Exchange to launch a new digital exchange for security token trading on the island.
Although yesterday’s tweet by the Binance CEO was quite interesting, perhaps his most interesting tweet was posted on 12 September 2018, when he said that he disagreed with Vladik Buterin’s view that the crypto space had reached a level of maturity that meant that “1000x price increases” were no longer possible:
“I still disagree with this,” he mentioned and “I will say crypto will absolutely grow 1000x and more!” Just reaching USD market cap will give it close to 1000x, (that’s just one currency with severely restricted use case), and the derivatives market is so much bigger.”
Vitalik Non-giver of Ether answered him declaring that “to be clear, I never said that there is “no room for growth” in the crypto ecosystem. I said there is no room for *1000x price increases*. A 1000x price increase from today means $200T in crypto, or ~an entire 70% of today’s global wealth being in crypto.”
As we can see, the crypto world is more alive than ever before.
