Asia’s Leading Exchanges Team Up Amid Chinese Fcoin Closure

One of the leading crypto exchanges in South Korea – Bithumb, announced that the company enters into a pivotal cooperation with BitMax, a Singapore-based digital asset trading platform. The joint forces will concentrate on the development of new services and products to expand the global presence for both Bithumb and Bitmax.

The signed on February 17, 2020, Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between the two companies comes amid extensive competition in the crypto exchange sector. The main goal of the MoU is to battle the competition with the launch of jointly developed services and products. Bithumb and BitMax would share knowledge and technical expertise in the fields of blockchain and IT infrastructure.

George Cao, CEO of Bitmax, commented on the news about the partnership, stating that “product innovations have always been in the core of our institutional trading platform.”

“We are excited about the new partnership, as now we can combine our know-how and technical infrastructure with Bithumb’s deep understanding of the crypto business. We will work side-by-side to create products and services, operable across the ecosystem of both companies”, Cao added.

BitMax, despite founded in 2018, gathered a strong team of Wall Street veterans, including people with prior experience for Bloomberg, Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, and Gemini. Even Greg Cao is the former CIO of Delpha Capital Management.

Bithumb relies on the expertise level of the people at BitMax to further improve its products. BitMax, on the other hand, is one of the top-10 global market players, based on liquidity. The cooperation would enhance Bithumb’s security, as the exchange suffered from at least three hacks during its lifetime.

The partnership comes amid Chinese crypto exchange FCoin shutting down operations, leaving $125 million worth of cryptocurrencies away from its clients. According to Zhang Jian, the founder of FCoin, the company may not pay its users around 13,000 Bitcoin. Despite Jian reassuring clients that the shutdown of the operation is not an exit scam, crypto experts are on the opposite opinion.

Zhang announced that the shutdown is a consequence of a series of data errors, and that “the problem is hard to explain with plain words.”

FCoin is a rather new exchange – it started operations in May 2019. FCoin quickly became a news sensation, reporting record-breaking trading volumes with its innovative “transaction mining” business model. However, several crypto enthusiasts reported that the trading volumes are not real. Some users even accused FCoin of using bots, which “manipulate” prices.

Signals for fraudulent behavior started from the get-go since FCoin distributed half of its native tokens without airdrops or an ICO campaign. Changpeng Zhao, Binance’s CEO, even called FCoin a Ponzi scheme, stating that “FCoin’s founder apparently found a better invention than Bitcoin. However, the large number of data-derived problems that we noticed, as well as dividend and mining returns, would not result in any good.”

During the shutdown, FCoin utilized its risk-control account, further increasing the speculation about FCoin committing and exit scam scenario. However, Zhang wrote that he, personally, would reply to everyone, seeking to withdraw funds. Zhang even mentioned a compensation mechanism from his other projects, but as of press time, there is no evidence of the existence of such businesses.