Bitcoin technology is unquestionably finding its share of fans in Japan, a country which recently proposed a rather friendlier regulatory framework for the digital currency. And now, the land of the rising sun is making a similar progress in terms of online trading.
Over the gone weekend, Japan has reportedly recorded the world’s second highest Bitcoin trade volume, falling just short of touching China, while beating the US. A discussion initiated on Reddit provided an image to prove the claim. The snapshot showed how BTC/JPY trading instruments was sitting on the top of BTC/USD and BTC/EUR respectively. Even though the source of this information has not be ascertained yet, it still seemed pretty plausible.
Japan has a prolific cryptocurrency ecosystem which has bounced back on track after Mt Gox, a scandalous Bitcoin exchange which lost million of dollars of people’s money to an inside hack. A fair amount of pundits saw the incident as an end of Bitcoin in the region but – against all the odds – the Japanese regulators took steps to create a confident environment for Bitcoin community. It encouraged the digital currency’s adoption by recently recognizing it as any other fiat currency.
While the credibility of the Reddit post about yesterday’s BTC/JPY trade volume is being debated, the country’s Bitcoin exchanges handle at least 50000 bitcoins on an average every day, which itself is a big amount. One of the Japanese Bitcoin exchanges, Zaif has recently traded over 45k bitcoin in one day.
The cryptocurrency community in Japan is not just interested in Bitcoin, but there is also an increasing interest in other digital currency platforms, and blockchain technology as well. For instance: Many startups in Japan are creating applications on Counterparty, another financial application protocol which is built on Bitcoin’s blockchain.
According to reports, there are already over 1000 merchants across Japan that accept bitcoin payments. Similarly, the country also has a large number of Bitcoin ATMs – over 13 Bitcoin machines – operational across the country.
Whether the Reddit post about yesterday’s bitcoin trade volumes is ‘legit’ or not, is an entirely different matter. Even if the numbers in that post is wrong at the moment, it will turn out to be true in the future as the usage of Bitcoin and other digital currencies continues to grow.
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