Asia’s Banking Giant Gets Greenlight For Bitcoin and Ethereum Exchange

One of Asia’s biggest bank with half a trillion in assets under management and $10 billion in yearly revenue, has announced they have received an “in-principle approval by the Monetary Authority of Singapore to recognise DBS Digital Exchange as a Recognised Market Operator.”

The subsidiary of DBS bank is thus expected to begin trading next week, offering bitcoin, eth, BCH and XRP.

In fiat trading pairs they offer JPY, as well as US, Hong Kong and Singaporean dollars, making DBS potentially an avenue for Japanese institutional investors to enter the market.

The bank itself says they are “in the three key Asian axes of growth: Greater China, Southeast Asia and South Asia,” but it doesn’t look likely they’ll offer crypto trading to Chinese institutional investors.

“The exponential pace of asset digitalisation provides immense opportunities to reshape capital markets,” Piyush Gupta, the CEO of DBS, said before adding:

“For Singapore to become even more competitive as a global financial hub, we have to prepare ourselves to welcome the mainstream adoption of digital assets and currency trading.

DBS is committed to accelerating the development of a fully integrated ecosystem to facilitate this. We believe that this is the first of its kind integrated offering, which is differentiated in many ways.”

It is the first of its kind in Asia and its tokenization offering may be the first of its kind in the world. The bank says:

“Companies searching for an option to raise private capital from qualified investors can tap on DBS to securitise real and financial assets into digital tokens, known as ‘Security Tokens,’ for listing and trading on DBS Digital Exchange.”

The Swiss stock exchange SIX recently partnered with SBI to launch something similar for tokenized offerings, but their plans extend to 2022.

While for DBS, this is now good to go just a couple of months after announcing their intention in October.

Meaning the crypto way for institutional investors is now opening to one of the world’s biggest economic region.