The oldest Bitcoin exchange in the world, BTCC has been acquired by an unnamed Hong Kong blockchain investment firm.
According to the CEO and co-founder, Bobby Lee,
“Today’s acquisition is an incredible milestone for BTCC that validates all of our hard work over the past few years. I’m very excited about the resources this gives BTCC to move faster and aggressively grow our businesses in 2018 and beyond.”
Calvin Cheng, Singaporean businessman and advisor to the investment fund that acquired BTCC, stated “We’re humbled that we were able to acquire BTCC. BTCC has an unparalleled brand and reputation, and we look forward to taking it to greater heights of success internationally.”
BTCC was founded in 2011 under the name BTC China and has been operating in Shanghai since then. But after the Chinese financial regulator implemented a crackdown on local exchanges in September last year, the firm moved its headquarters to Hong Kong.
In 2017 alone, the exchange traded Bitcoins worth $25 billion. It also operates a mining pool that produced Bitcoin worth around $900 million within the same year. Its third arm of business is a bitcoin wallet known as Mobi for Android and Apple mobile devices.
The terms of the purchase are as yet undisclosed but the platform’s executives have expressed their intention to direct their exclusive focus on the above three products as well as on the international market.
Executive Roles
The BTCC mining pool will come under the oversight of Denver Zhao who has an MBA from the University of Strathclyde and extensive sales experience. He said that the acquisition would assist the company to reach its long term goal of global adoption.
He further elaborated,
“We now have the resources to more fully realize our vision of safeguarding and stabilizing digital currencies’ blockchains. Going forward, we’ll provide better, fairer, more transparent, and more comprehensive mining services to our customers worldwide.”
Mark Ma, who was previously a product designer on Alibaba, will be in charge of the Mobi wallet. He says that the wallet that was introduced in March of last year currently has users from 180 different countries.
He adds, “The capital injection we received today gives us a boost towards reaching our goal to grab a dominant market share in the payments and digital currency industries of each of those countries.”
The USD/BTC exchange will be led by Aaron Choi who has served in management positions in a number of startups including Chinapex, Tapjoy and RockYou. He echoes the sentiments of the other executives by saying,
“The acquisition gives us resources to more effectively apply our unparalleled industry knowledge to provide customers with the most accessible digital currency services.”
Old School CEO
The BTCC CEO, who believes that regulations are crucial to minimizing fraud in the blockchain industry, last week attended the London Blockchain week.
He was quoted saying
“Unfortunately I’m very conservative, I’m very old school. I don’t touch altcoins, I don’t touch ICOs. It’s just too risky. It just doesn’t make sense to invest in those guys. Maybe I’ll change my mind next month, next year, I don’t know… I only recognize and endorse Bitcoin, Litecoin, Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash.”