SBI Group Puts $15 Million USD Into Tangem, the “Smart Card” Wallet Manufacturer

One of the largest Japanese financial companies, the SBI Group, has decided to invest $15 Million USD in Tangem, a “smart card” cryptocurrency wallet manufacturer. With this new investment, Tangem will relocate its business to another country. Now the company will move to Zug, Switzerland, home of the so-called Crypto Valley, the largest crypto hub in the country.

The goal os Tangem is to create new use cases for physical smart cards, the main product of the company. According to the press release, each of these smart cards will have some crypto in it. They will be able to be acquired by people that are not interested in holding cryptos for too long and just want to make quick payments with them.

In this regard, the service will be very similar to the hardware wallet version of banknotes. With them, people will have easy ways to make quick crypto payments even outside of the internet.

The CEO of Tangem, Andrey Kurennykh, has affirmed that the main mission of the company is to make the blockchain technology really closer to people’s lives. With the help of this technology, many industries will finally be able to benefit from having a more decentralized way to receive and to payments.

Tangem’s co-founder, Anselm Schmucki, was the former head of UBS and he decided to combine the expertise of both the Russian and Swiss industries in this project. The company currently employs 13 people in four countries: Russia, Switzerland, Singapore and Hong Kong.

So far, the startup was responsible for selling over 25,000 wallets, especially to companies such as Cardano and RSK. The first sale was made in 2018 and the company has been keeping its business busy since then.

About The SBI Group

Also known as Strategic Business Innovator Group, the SBI Group is a Japanese company founded in 1999 with the name of SoftBank. The holding company is publicly listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange and it launched the first cryptocurrency exchange owned by a bank in Japan last year.