After a brief period of marginal price gains last week,
Bitcoin (BTC) has seen prices fall throughout the day declining 2.5% at press time, down to US$7,537.
Ethereum (ETH) is currently trading around US$594, down 4.25% in overnight trading, and
Ripple (XRP) has fallen 3.3% at US$0.64.
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Japanese banking giant launches first bank-backed cryptocurrency exchange
SBI Holdings, a multi-billion dollar Japanese financial services company, announced earlier today that its in-house cryptocurrency market is now live, after a months-long delay because of safety concerns. It's called VCTRADE, and the agency is now only open for customers who have pre-registered with the platform at October 2017, the company stated in the announcement and expects it to be accessible for a larger public in July of this year.
In the
announcement on Monday, SBI revealed it will initially focus on trading XRP, the native token powering
Ripple’s Consensus Ledger (RCL), with upcoming support for bitcoin. 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.
The announcement also indicated 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.