The Singapore financial center shows its strict side: Anyone who was naively hoping to find a new Eldorado for digital currencies here is mistaken. More than 170 companies had applied for one of the coveted licenses to work with cryptocurrencies on the Southeast Asian island. However, more than a hundred of them have since given up and withdrawn their applications, or they have been sorted out. However, the list of applicants for a license is also extremely colorful: It ranges from digital trading platforms to asset managers and advisors to specialist companies for business customers who want to open up to digital currency. What they all have in common is that they want to adorn themselves with what they may now stumble upon: Singapore's strict regulation.Applicants hope that anyone who receives a license under this regime will appear particularly clean and practically "state-approved".
Christoph Hein
Business correspondent for South Asia / Pacific based in Singapore.
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For example, the world's largest trading platform, Binance, still offers the purchase and sale of Bitcoin, Ethereum or Binance Coin in Singapore, which are all heavily regulated.
This will soon come to an end: Binance Asia Services will cease trading in mid-January.
Binance will be shut down in Singapore in mid-February.
The young company has already withdrawn its application for approval from the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS).
“The decision was not an easy one for us and we apologize in advance for any inconvenience it may cause,” it says on the website.
Others put the case much more soberly: Accordingly, Binance simply did not meet the high requirements of the MAS and is now building a legend.
There can't be too many investors
The case attracted attention among experts because Vertex Ventures, Binance's local partner, is supported by Singapore's state-owned investment firm Temasek Holdings. Nevertheless, they waited months for a license until Binance pulled the rip cord or it was pulled. And this, although Binance will soon decide on its international headquarters - and the rich city-state is actually after the relocation of corporate headquarters. Now there is a lot to be said for a seat in Dubai or a European metropolis. But the Binance makers do not want to crash completely with Singapore: Now at least a center for the development of the basic blockchain technology is to be founded at the equator. For investors who trusted the stock exchange, all of this can now become very expensive: Binance allows itself towho do not withdraw their money in time and have their accounts deleted with a one-time fee of 20 percent of the total deposit in cryptocurrency and a further 5 percent "maintenance fee" per month.
The future of many of the other platforms on the MAS’s still long list is more than uncertain.
What is certain is that Ravi Menon, the highly respected central bank governor, declared a long time ago that the city-state does not need 170 players in the crypto sector, but rather "perhaps half".
Menon remains open, but critical.
"The prices of crypto tokens are not based on economic fundamentals and are exposed to strong speculative fluctuations," he just warned: "Investors in these tokens run the risk of suffering significant losses.
However, MAS is also of the opinion that blockchains and crypto tokens can bring many potential advantages. ”The licensing system, which was openly designed last January, was intended to be an alternative to a potentially overregulated Hong Kong.