A bank of Thailand bought a majority stake in its domestic crypto exchange

It’s not an uncommon event to see any country’s financial institution investing in their domestic crypto exchanges. Many countries have seen such events and recently, the oldest bank of Thailand has done so, acquiring a major stake in its domestic crypto exchange.

Siam Commercial Bank, the oldest bank of Thailand, has acquired a 51% stake in Thai crypto exchange Bitkub. Moreover, the bank paid 17.85 billion baht ($536.6 million) for a majority stake in the exchange.

The bank announced this through an announcement dated Tuesday. Moreover, after the regulatory approval, the transaction will complete in the first quarter of 2022 expectedly.

Talking about the exchange, Bitkub has reported a trading volume of over $30 billion from January to September 2021. In fact, this makes it the country’s largest crypto exchange with a comfortable margin. As a matter of fact, Bitkub has a market share of over 90%.

Also, Thailand’s Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has licensed this particular crypto exchange. However, the exchange has faced severe outages this year, one of which lasted 16 hours. In fact, this came at a time when trading activity was pretty high. Also, SEC had ordered the popular crypto exchange to temporarily shut down and fix the issues.

Besides this, an anonymous industry insider had cited in a report that users had concerns regarding the crypto exchange’s closure and inability to handle large trading volumes. Moreover, SEC had given Bitkub a time period of five days to iron out the issues and resume trading for users to prevent any unintended mishaps on the crypto exchange.

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