The world's first cryptocurrency exchange with banking support is open to the public after several months of delays.
Japanese financial giant SBI Holdings officially launched its own trading crypto-platform, called VCTRADE last month. However, as reported then, the trade service was available only to a group of selected users who previously registered on the platform in October last year.
In an announcement published on Tuesday, SBI Holdings said that the service is now fully open to users between the ages of 20 and 70 who live in Japan. However, the registration service for corporate clients is not yet available.
During the June launch, VCTRADE announced that, it will initially support the Japanese yen against the XRP, its own Ripple token, a step that is consistent with wider support for the XRP SBI Holdings token both in the field of interbank transfers and cross-border payments. Subsequently, the platform added trade pairs based on the yen to BTC and BCH on June 8 and 15, respectively.
Yesterday's public launch occurred almost two years after SBI Holdings first announced that it would create the stock exchange in October 2016. The platform itself received a license from the Japanese financial regulator - the Financial Services Agency, at the end of last year.
The launch of the platform has been postponed for several months since the firm worked to increase the level of internal security after the cracking of the Japanese exchange Coincheck.
SBI Holdings is not the first time demonstrating interest in crypto and blockchain. Back in 2016, SBI launched an exchange of cryptocurrencies, which in effect became the first of its kind to exchange the cryptocurrency with the support of a large financial group. In October last year, SBI Holdings outlined in its financial report a plan to "create a new financial ecosystem based on cryptocurrency", which includes joint research of collecting "systematic knowledge" of the technology of blockchain.