Binance’s New Fiat-to-Bitcoin Exchange Set to Launch in Singapore Next Week

Towards the beginning of the month, CEO Changpeng Zhao of Binance spoke on the new fiat on-ramp that his company was planning for Singapore. However, it looks like the public has a more specific timeline now, as Binance CFO Wei Zhou said that the new opportunity in Singapore will soon be available next week in the highly-anticipated crypto exchange.

Zhou added that the platform will be an entirely new product, making it easier for Singaporean citizens to purchase and sell Bitcoin with the local currency.

At the moment, the only coin planned to be available on the platform will be Bitcoin. However, Zhou said that the company is working to add other cryptocurrencies at some point. Zhou pointed out that using Bitcoin is simply a way to help the jurisdiction use the platform with something familiar, which will make it easy to “gradually build on that.”

Binance already had fiat-to-crypto gateways in the works by the beginning of 2019, during which time the platform partnered with Simplex to let users purchase multiple cryptocurrencies with Visa and MasterCard. By March, the company launched Binance Lite in Australia.

Over the last few months, Binance has been making a lot of progress over, as they have expanded in Europe and the UK. They have already gotten set up in Uganda as they have encouraged the local governments to improve the financial opportunities for consumers that remain unbanked. Presently, Uganda is the fifth-biggest exchange by 24-hour trade volume, based on data from CoinMarketCap. Zhou expressed that there’s plans to get involved in the United States, but he added that he “can’t go into these right now.”

Along with the work in other countries, Binance has also is working to build a system of decentralized exchange on Binance Chain, which the platform created for transferring and trading assets based on the blockchain. As far as that timing, Zhou said that the testnet is already up and running, but the mainnet should be released “by the end of the month as well.”

Pursuing the DEX path is due to several reasons, like offering trading functionality and holding customer assets for consumers, but they want to avoid being a target for a hacker. Zhou added that the only real consistent factor in cryptocurrency is change, so they are following along with the clear needs of the public. He pointed out that 90% of the trading two years ago was fiat-to-crypto, while today’s trading is 90% crypto-to-crypto.

As Zhou sees it, the key to being successful is remembering that “innovation is going to happen regardless of whether it comes from us or other people.” He added that the priority of Coinbase is to be “proactive.” Though there are many changes and many launches in the air, Zhou added that the progress on disrupting the business model is “almost there, very close.”

Speaking about the institutional investors that the market has been expecting for a while, Zhou said that their own involvement with this group has increased by up to 50% in the last six months. Much of the activity from these traders has been with the application programming interface (API), which is ushering in a new type of institution. These projects do not have as much capital as hedge funds, but still remain “highly nimble, highly algorithm-driven, and highly efficient.”