In Jun, 2018 Japanese financial giant SBI Holdings announced that after a month delay due to security concerns, its in-house cryptocurrency exchange is now live.

The service called VCTRADE is currently only availabe for users who have pre-registered with the platform in October 2017, the company announced that and expected it will be outspreaded to the public this year.

Furthermore, VCTRADE will focus on the trading of XRP as its first stage, the native token stemmed from the Ripple protocol then it will continously support for bitcoin and bitcoin cash although a primary timeline for that remains unclear at this first stage.

The decision might be not absolutely surprising given SBI Holdings’ recent works to pilot the remittance technology provided by the San Francisco-based Ripple which is using a distributed ledger to make cross-border transactions.

SBI Holdings firmed its first wholly-owned subsidiary named SBI Virtual Currencies in October 2016 in an attempt to launch the country’s first crypto exchange that is comprehensively backed by a major financial institution.

Thenceforth the platform completed business registration in Japan’s Financial Services Agency (FSA) in September 2017. But it announced in February of this year that the launching would be hold since security concerns of the Coincheck hack.

After SBI Virtual Currencies has canceled a partnership in March with Huobi crypto exchange that would use the later’s financial and technological resources to launch VCTRADE, the new service will be initiated.