The following year, the staff of the Japanese regulator, which oversees the cryptocurrency companies will be increased. As stated by the representative of the financial services Agency (FSA), the decision was made in view of the growing interest of Japanese companies in obtaining licenses to operate as a cryptocurrency exchange.
The specialists of the main Supervisory authority, the Japanese financial market yesterday held the fifth meeting of the study group on cryptocurrency with the representatives of stock exchanges, lawyers, academics and civil servants. During the meeting, the Vice-Commissioner of the FSA for policy coordination national and Sasaki (Sasaki Kiyotaka) noted that at the moment functions for the supervision of the activities related to cryptocurrencies, the institution assigned to 30 people, they examine applications for licences.
According to Reuters, Sasaki said that the Agency plans to bring 12 more people to work in the group in the next financial year, this requires a rapid growth in industry of cryptocurrency exchanges.
In accordance with the document submitted to the FSA after the meeting, currently the specialists of the Agency are considering 16 applications for a license at the same time, the regulator has information about more than 160 of the companies planning to apply, among which are public.
Representatives of the FSA said: 12 out of 16 companies have withdrawn their applications after receiving instructions of the controller, one application was rejected, the other three, including Coincheck, the final decision is still pending.
We will remind, the first meeting of the study group of the FSA, held in April, had a direct relation to Coincheck, breaking which in January brought the attackers at least $400 million and forced the Agency to begin testing companies engaged in similar activities.
In the report the FSA was also presented interesting data showing the lack of qualified personnel working in the field of crypto-currencies:
“Many of the exchange control large sums of assets users, having a small team — an average of 3.3 billion yen (about $30 million) per employee”.
According to the information provided, while the total amount of investors ‘ assets stored in the Japanese cryptocurrency exchanges over the last year increased by 553% (currently, $6.2 billion), more than 75% of the exchanges have fewer than 20 people.
The volume of cryptocurrency trading in Japan for several years has increased significantly: $97 billion — is the amount of trading volume attributable only to bitcoin, one 2017.
As you know, getting a license in Japan requires compliance with a set of criteria in the sphere of security; the exchange was also faced with the stringent requirements of the new rules was marked by the FSA in June.
Still the license is needed, tokens LINK, which announced the operator of the country’s popular Line messenger, yet be unavailable to a resident of Japan.
