Binance CEO Talks Down Expansion To Japan, Saying It’s Highly Unlikely

Binance CEO talks down the expansionary plans to Japan, saying it is highly unlikely for the exchange to open new branches there as we can see more today in our latest Binance news.

The Binance CEO talks down the possibility of his exchange expanding in Japan and he did stop to rule out launching the Japanese branch and indicated that the prospects of opening a platform in Tokyo were highly unlikely. The Binance CEO was speaking in a Q&A session with the Japanese outlet Coin Post where he gave more indications on the East Asian markets especially those in South Korea and Japan saying that these markets are hard to crack.

Last week, Binance Korea announced they will be closing the doors with a strong shutdown slated for next month. Earlier this year, Binance suffered another major blow in its hope to crack the Japanese market with the TaoTao crypto exchange ending the possibility of a partnership after 10 months of negotiations. TaoTao was taken over shortly after the financial giant SBI which is another indication that if rich pickings are going to be hed on the market, it will be the domestic players who are making them.

Zhao stated that he considered establishing a base in Japan especially after the government introduced the regulatory permit system back in 2017. He added that there are a number of bottlenecks that hinder the exchange’s progress in the country like the fact that Binance is an international platform that handles more than 80+ tokens but Japanese law policies the token exchanges are allowed to handle only FSA-approved ones that can be offered in trading pairs. The FSA approved about 30 tokens so far.

 “The situation in Japan hasn’t changed much.”

Zhao stated that he already contemplated making an acquisition deal with the established Japanese player but thinks that the legislation will minimize the advantages of Binance over Japanese competitors. The current Japanese exchanges have close ties to the banks and other market players which is another factor that makes the market hard to crack for the overseas players. The exchanges also have close ties to the key media groups and strong marketing departments that have experience working on the Japanese market which as Zhao said, are not strong suits of his platform.

Binance expects to have profits of more than $800 million to $1 billion which is an increase from $570 million last year. In the meantime, another major crypto exchange-BitMEX left Japan and Kraken returned to the market while Coinbase was working on this. This year, Japanese market-leading crypto exchange Bitflyer said that it linked EU operations with its domestic platform thus allowing the traders to access BTC and Japanese yen trading pairs.