Japanese Brokerage Firm Monex Offers to Buy Crypto Exchange Coincheck
Earlier this year in January 2018, the news of Japanese crypto exchange Coincheck getting hacked had shocked the crypto world as this has been one of the biggest hacks worth $533 million in the history of crypto markets.
Following this major incident, the crypto exchange had to undergo a lot of scrutiny from the Japanese regulators, however, Coincheck somehow managed to repay all the victimized customers to the best of its capacity.
According to the latest reports from Reuters, a Japanese online brokerage firm Monex Group Inc has put forward a proposal of buying out Coincheck exchange. Not much details of the proposal are available at the moment, but if the deal goes through it could be worth several billion Yen. Reports also suggest that the official announcement of the same could be made anytime ahead this week.
If the deal is successful, Monex will get a complete access to Coincheck’s trading platform and customer base. This would be the entry of another mainstream financial service operator within the rapidly growing cryptocurrency trading market of Japan.
Monex is Japan’s third-largest online brokerage firm by customer accounts and it the deal goes through, it will pitch a straight competition to rival SBI Holdings which has last year obtained a license to run crypto exchange in the country. Also, one of Japan’s most popular messaging app Line Corp has also applied for a license to run crypto exchange through its financial arm. The messaging app currently provides payments and money transfer services to nearly 40 million users.
Coincheck which has remained consistently under the scrutiny of Japan’sFinancial Service Agency post the hack, has yet not given details about how many number of customers it has on date. As per another industry reports, Coincheck’s rank has slipped to the fifth position in March in terms of trading volumes by any crypto exchange. The overall market share of the crypto exchange is 8.7 percent. It has to be noted that before the hack or till the end of 2017, Coincheck was the largest crypto exchange accounting for almost half the market size.
Soon as the news broke out, Monex’s share surged by a whopping 23 percent on the Tokyo Stock Exchange, thereby taking the company’s valuations to 114.3 billion yen ($1.08 billion). As on December 2017, Monex has around 1.7 million registered accounts on its platform thereby holding around 4.3 trillion yen in customers’ assets.
Apart from the plans to enter the crypto exchange business, Monex is also looking to make some global tie-ups in the crypto space.