Japan’s JVCEA Loses Both BitFlyer & Bitbank CEOs After New Regulation Enforcements

The Japanese FSA has been in the spotlight frequently lately for their disownment of locally-based cryptocurrencies. Their legislation is evolving to handle their ban on cryptocurrency, but that has not changed the fact that there are some people that do not want to stay in this seemingly sinking ship.

After the FSA gave orders to six different Japanese exchanges to improve their business practices, they lost two of their vice presidents of the company. Yuza Kano was one of the vice presidents, who is the CEO at BitFlyer, while Hiroyuki Noriuki, the CEO of Bitbank, was the other at the Japan Virtual Currency Exchange Association. Their resignation letters were timed pretty quickly after the notices were issued.

In regard to the changes, JVCEA said, “In response to the fact that vice chairmen of the association, Yuzo Kano and Hiroyuki Noriyuki, representative directors of BitFlyer Co. Ltd. and Bitbank Corporation, received business improvement orders concerning their virtual currency exchange businesses, we inform you that we have received resignation requests from both of the vice presidents on this date and have accepted them.”

Even though the platform has accepted these resignations, there has been no explanation to define their departure. BitFlyer is the largest crypto exchange in the country, but they put a ban on new accounts on June 21^st with the improvement orders.

The whole goal of the FSA is to create better security in exchanges, which have recently been under fire for their easily-hacked platforms. Most of the changes that the regulations require involve efforts to prevent money laundering and KYC regulations. The major reason that the Japanese sector of the industry is cracking down is due to a Coincheck hack a few months ago that robbed users of over $500 million.

In April, the 16 local exchanges formed the JVCEA. The whole purpose was to self-regulate the cryptocurrency platforms available. In May, Japan created a five-point agenda that would help to regulate exchanges, managing areas like their structure, security, asset management, and KYC processes. In these guidelines, there was a strong suggestion towards limiting various privacy-related coins. These are the regulatory requirements that essentially preceding the departure of the two vice presidents.

Even with their leave, the organization remains positive and progressive. They described how they would start to clean up the crypto industry in Japan:

“We will continue to do our utmost to protect the interests of users and to promote the sound development of the virtual currency exchange industry, including the early establishment of voluntary regulation rules.”