Since late November 2017, South Korea has looked to regulate cryptocurrency trading in domestic exchanges. South Korea’s primary financial regulator is in discussions with counterparts in China and Japan toward the regulation of cryptocurrencies like bitcoin. South Korea is the world’s third largest market in bitcoin trading, after Japan and the U.S., and the largest […]

Blockchain has come a long way in eight years, with 2017 signaling the start of a paradigm shift in mainstream understanding of the technology. Blockchain-backed currencies have caught fire over the past nine months, partly in anticipation of major disruptions in the financial industry as a result of the distributed ledger. Blockchain’s appeal has helped […]

The Bangkok Post reported this week that Thailand’s business authorities have officially registered bitcoin exchange Coins Co., making the company a fully legal e-commerce company in the country. The move strongly suggests that the seemingly hostile attitude towards digital currency seen earlier this year from Thai authorities, including a statement from the Bank of Thailand […]

Venture capitalists and angel investors are betting big on bitcoin’s appeal in emerging-market economies, a trend only reinforced by BitX’s latest fundraising announcement. The Singapore-based bitcoin services provider revealed today that it has raised $824,000 in a seed-funding round. Investors include London-based Ariadne Capital and Palo Alto-based investor Carol Realini, as well seemingly ubiquitous bitcoin-backer […]

In a blog post published yesterday, Singapore-based bitcoin exchange itBit announced plans to relocate its main office halfway across the planet to New York City. The move appears to signal a growing sense that the safest setting for bitcoin-based trading is no longer the relatively permissive Southeast Asian city-state, but rather the soon-to-be regulated by […]

As bitcoin adoption rages across China, other countries in southeast Asia are slowly wading into the cryptocurrency pool as well. Earlier this week, Bitcoin Indonesia announced that its homegrown exchange had grown to a daily volume of 30 BTC, six times its trading volume in December. While that volume is admittedly humble, Indonesia is also […]

South Korean Bitcoin exchange Coinplug has released three new Android apps to help spur adoption of the cryptocurrency in the country. Coinplug’s trio are familiar tools for the Bitcoin faithful: a wallet, a trading app and a self-contained point of sale (POS) system for merchants. These appear to be the first Bitcoin apps created specifically […]

In August of 2013, the Bank of Thailand released a strongly worded letter explaining that Bitcoin was an “illegal” form of currency in the country. Even though Thailand’s central bank lacked the authority to actually make trading in Bitcoin a crime, the disapproval was strong enough that public trading in Bitcoin was effectively halted in […]