Japanese banks will offer new ways to protect bitcoin investors [↻70%]
Japanese banks will offer new ways to protect bitcoin investors "
After the recent loud cracking of the Coincheck exchange, which seized more than $ 500 million, Japanese trust banks plan to offer new ways to protect crypto-currency investors by managing the digital assets of exchanges. This is reported by the Nikkei Asian Review.
Such services, financial institutions consider, will ensure the safety of clients' funds even in the event of bankruptcy of exchanges.
Traditionally, Japanese trust banks are engaged in lending and receiving savings, as well as carry out trust operations, usually with property or pension funds.
Now they can expand the range of services offered, covering the crypto-currency industry. According to the plan, users of crypto-exchange exchanges will continue to trade transactions on them, but banks will manage the funds. The exchanges themselves will become just intermediaries between traders and financial institutions.
The first who is expected to implement such an initiative in April, will be Mitsubishi UFJ Trust and Banking. In addition, Sumitomo Mitsui Trust Bank also plans to provide similar services.
The new law on payment services, which took effect in April last year, requires that exchanges manage user funds separately from their own. However, the newspaper notes, many Japanese crypto-exchanges are small start-ups with limited investment opportunities, and often they consider users' means as their own. And the latest incident with Coincheck, the second-largest stock exchange in Japan, has shown that large platforms are also at risk, whose capabilities in terms of providing protection are much broader.
Guarantees for the return of funds to investors in the event of fraud, burglary or bankruptcy, as a rule, do not, and this is exactly what Mitsubishi UFJ Trust and Banking wants to solve. The current legislation requires that trust banks manage assets separately, and in the case of crypto-exchanges it is assumed that users' funds will be stored in "cold" purses without connection to the network. In addition, the bank will create numerous keys to online purses - this will help prevent unauthorized access and withdrawal of large amounts.
It is assumed that cooperation with trust banks will help exchanges make transactions more secure, but there are also fears that they can become more lengthy. Nevertheless, as the incident with Coincheck showed, the issues of security and safety of customer funds are increasingly coming to the fore.
