Tokoyo, Japan just got a whole lot more bitcoiny — and investors are looking up
After nearly a year of bitcoin rallying in the Asian pacific, the largest bitcoin exchange in Japan, bitFlyer, has managed to raise over 3 billion Yen ($27 million USD) from the top three banks in the country, Mitsubishi UFJ, Mizuho and SMBC, the firm said in its Tuesday announcement.
A year ago this March, the Japanese cabinet had officially recognized virtual cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin as having the same monetary properties as FIAT currencies, allowing them to be used as a means of paying for goods, services, and business settlements. Since then, bitFlyer has been working around the clock to establish themselves as a worthwhile opportunity to the Japanese banks in the hopes of proving the value of the bitcoin market, despite its volatility. Today, the company got its wish.
Recently, bitFlyer managed to exceed everyone’s expectations as becoming the largest bitcoin exchange in the world by volume, a whopping start to the new year and a staggering investment opportunity at 320 Yen ($2.81 billion USD) in trading volume, citing over 400 thousand users trading in January 2017 alone.
The three banking giants had earlier partnered with bitFlyer mid-2016 in order to test domestic money transfers over a blockchain, with technology provided by the bitcoin company. This proof-of-concept (PoC) experiment ran for the duration of 2016 into September and was a success, clocking 1500 transactions per second on the experimental blockchain. This brought peak speeds of the existing interbank wire system. The PoC experiment, dubbed “miyabi”, used bitFlyer’s proprietary blockchain and is slated to become a standard in virtual currency trading this year in Japan.