Quoine receives $16 million in Series B funding to dominate the Asian Bitcoin trading market

Author: Hey Yaoyao

Quoine is a Singaporean startup that provides Bitcoin trading and other cryptocurrency-related services. It targets the Asia-Pacific region, with Japan as its main market. Quoine's headquarters has now moved from Singapore to Japan. The company started with Japanese yen-denominated transactions, then slowly expanded to US dollars and euros. It currently supports ten currencies including the Singapore dollar and Hong Kong dollar.

Quoine announced yesterday that it has received $16 million in Series B funding. The Series B funding is still ongoing, and Quoine said it is possible to raise another $4 million from some potential business partners. This financing is mainly due to a bill recently passed by the Japanese parliament to regulate cryptocurrency transactions. The passage of this bill brings good prospects for Bitcoin transactions because it means that the demand for Bitcoin will increase exponentially. Last September, Quoine received $2 million in Series A funding from several angel investors, led by Japanese investment company Jafco, and followed by a venture capital company and several business companies.

In Coinhills' real-time ranking of global bitcoin trading volume, Quoine ranks seventh, and the top six are all Chinese exchanges. This ranking is enough to prove that Quoine is the largest bitcoin trading center in Japan and is also among the best in the world. Currently, Japan's annual foreign exchange (FX) trading volume has reached 50 trillion US dollars. Quoine's co-founder Kayamori predicts that 10% of FX trading will be completed by cryptocurrencies in the future. Quoine currently trades 50 million US dollars worth of bitcoin every day, but Kayamori believes that this number can be multiplied 100 times.

You may wonder, Quoine is not well-known in the Japanese Bitcoin market, which is true, but it ranks high in total transaction volume, how did it do it? What is the reason for this ranking? The answer is their B2B2C (business-to-business-to-commerce) business model. Through this model, Quoine provides the backend engine for Bitcoin transactions.

In Japan, many Internet service providers and online portals offer online brokerage services for stock and foreign exchange trading. However, as typical financial platforms, they have some requirements, including ensuring cost efficiency, and maintaining activity and stability, so many financial platforms adopt the systems of other online securities companies. This may also happen in the Bitcoin trading industry, so Quoine wants to ensure the realization of these requirements.

“This is an exchange for cryptocurrency trading. We want to be the cryptocurrency version of the Tokyo Stock Exchange,” Kayamori said.

In October 2014, Quoine cooperated with Indomog, the largest payment service provider in Indonesia, to establish a Bitcoin exchange in Indonesia. In addition, Quoine's business has also expanded to other Asian countries. In the future, Quoine's business center will be placed in the entire Asian region except Japan.

Quoine claims to be the largest cryptocurrency trading platform in Asia. Since some potential cryptocurrency users in different regions are held by local cryptocurrency exchanges and other service providers, Quoine may choose to cooperate with them to achieve this goal.