Coins.ph maps out global expansion starting with Mauritius approval

Coins, an affiliate of the Philippines-based virtual currency platform Coins.ph, has secured a license to operate in Mauritius after thorough scrutiny from regulators.

Upon fulfilling the requirements, the Financial Services Commission of Mauritius granted Coins.ph with four virtual asset service provider (VASP) licenses, giving it the green light to offer its services to residents. The licenses cover broker-dealer services, virtual asset wallet services, virtual asset custody, and marketplace offerings.

Coins CEO Wei Zhou described the development as the right step in the right direction for the fledgling company as it indicates its readiness to comply with regulatory authorities. Zhou noted that Coins will be working on securing licenses in other jurisdictions.

“As we work closely with regulators to ensure that our operations are safe and secure, obtaining the four virtual asset service provider licenses from the FSC is a positive step towards sharing our financial services with more people across the globe,” Zhou said.

Since the collapse of several centralized digital asset entities like Three Arrows Capital (3AC) and FTX, Mauritius’ regulators raised their guard over the asset class while some government officials mulled over a blanket ban. The FSC as an integrated regulator for non-bank financial services upped the requirements for VASPs seeking to operate in the country to comply with.

As a subsidiary of Coins.ph, it is widely expected that Coins will operate in the same manner as its Filipino holding company including the trading of virtual currencies and other financial services through its mobile app.

Founded in 2014, Coins.ph has gone on to garner over 16 million customers and holds the record as the first virtual currency firm in the region to hold both Electronic Money Issuer licenses from the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas. Experts believe that Coins could apply for a similar EMI license from Mauritius’ authorities to offer users a variety of financial offerings.

“What we want to do right now is rebuild our business to be a much more Web 3 native company to allow for our users and new users to use Coins to access Web 3 services,” said Zhou on the future of the company. “This includes the trading of digital assets in the metaverse and in games.”

The Philippines is leading the way

The Philippines is emerging as the region’s leading nation in distributed ledger technologies (DLT), non-fungible tokens (NFTs), and the metaverse. Experts have cited the lack of a hostile regulatory environment as the reason for the spike in innovation from the Southeast Asian country.

A recent report from the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) placed the Philippines as the 54th-ranked nation in its Frontier Technology Index. The index tracked the rate of innovation in the sectors of DLT, Big Data, Artificial Intelligence (AI), and nanotechnology.

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