On Saturday (15 September 2018), day two of the Cumberland Summit in Singapore, Changpeng “CZ” Zhao, co-founder and CEO of crypto exchange Binance, probably the world’s largest crypto exchange by traded volume, “accidentally” revealed plans to launch a fiat-to-crypto exchange in Singapore. CZ said that a close beta test would begin on September 18th.

Later that day, the Binance CEO admitted to his mistake on Twitter:

This means that it is quite likely that the Singapore exchange will be launched before the end of the year, and that it will be offering SGD/BTC and SGD/ETH trading pairs.

It is not too surprising to hear that Binance has chosen to launch in Singapore, a global financial hub with relatively low taxes, a tech-friendly atmosphere, and a reputation as a good place to launch ICOs; a few examples of ICOs launched in Singapore are TenX, Golem, and Qtum. Coinbase, Gemini, and Huobi already have a presence in Singapore. Also, foundations for Litecoin, TRON, and VeChain are based here.

In June 2018, Japan’s LINE Corporation announced that it was going to launch its own crypto exchange (called BITBOX) in Singapore; this exchange began operations on 16 July 2018.

On 11 September 2018, Malta Today reported that Binance had signed a memorandum of understanding with the Malta Stock Exchange to launch a new digital exchange for security token trading. 

Although yesterday’s tweet by the Binance CEO was quite interesting, perhaps his most interesting tweet was posted on 12 September 2018, when he said that he disagreed with Vladik Buterin’s view that the crypto space had reached a level of maturity that meant that “1000x price increases” were no longer possible:

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