Morgan Stanley says that Malta is the country with the highest volume of transactions in cryptocurrencies

The investment and financial services bank Morgan Stanley this week sent its clients a report on the activity of the main cryptocurrency exchange houses on a global scale. This report reports the list of countries in which the greatest volume of commercialization of this type of assets is registered, according to the place where the legal headquarters of these exchange offices are registered.

Malta leads the list, with a daily transaction volume of almost 1.2 billion dollars, followed by South Korea, Belize, the Seychelles and the United States, according to Business Insider.

Malta is developing a regulatory framework aimed at providing breadth and legal certainty to companies that operate around cryptoactive and blockchain technology. Thanks to this attitude of openness, some of the largest exchange houses in the world have moved their legal headquarters to the European country, among them Binance and OKEx, the first and third exchange houses, respectively, with the largest global volume of transactions, such and as seen in the graph below.

Morgan Stanley, in addition to studying the volume of cryptocurrency transactions according to the country where each exchange house is registered, also made a comparison between the countries with more legally established exchange houses.

The countries that host the largest number of exchange houses are the United Kingdom (22), Hong Kong (15), the United States (11), Singapore (10), Turkey (8) and Brazil (7). In this ranking, from the Latin American region, they appear next to Brazil: Argentina (4), Chile (3), Panama (2) and Mexico (1). The Morgan Stanley report highlights that, although the United Kingdom has more cryptocurrency exchange houses, its volume of transactions barely reaches 1% of the world total.

CONSULTATION TO THE ECOSYSTEM

In a consultation document circulated by the Secretariat of Financial Services of the Parliament of Malta, the attitude of opening of the Maltese government to progress in technology and development at the economic level is appreciated. The purpose of this consultation is to receive feedback, from companies in the fintech area, on the establishment of the Malta Digital Innovation Authority for the certification of Distributed Accounting Technology and related service providers.

The secretary of the Parliament, Silvio Schembre, says in the document that the proposed framework "will offer legal certainty in a space that is currently lacking in regulation" and will touch on aspects such as types of authorization, legal personality and the applicability of the law in smart contracts. It also describes the conditions for the realization of Initial Currency Offers (ICO) among other aspects related to cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology.