What Nations are Seeing a Surge in Cryptocurrency / Digital Asset Businesses?

July 15, 2019

Bill Taylor, Chief Investment Officer, Fintek Capital LLC, weighs the pros and cons of establishing digital asset funds in various jurisdictions around the world. Nations cited include: Gibraltar, Singapore, Switzerland and Malta.

Note: this video was filmed on May 21st, a few weeks prior to the release of Facebook’s Libra Whitepaper.

Transcript

Dara Albright: Where, other than Gibraltar, have you looked to set up shop?
Bill Taylor: When we started this, we looked for a different jurisdiction because U.S. regulators were not going to be favorable anytime soon at defining a digital asset or what it is, especially digital gold. So looking around, we want it to be in a secure country with solid regulations that would be accepted by the institutional community. If it's a brand new product, you want to make sure everything's perfect. We looked at Singapore. Singapore was a great place for ICOs at the time, but it was starting to have some hesitation of what could be done. We were advised that that might drag on. We looked at looked at Switzerland, which obviously is a great place but is wildly expensive. It was way too expensive to do.

DA: That's interesting because Facebook is rumored to be launching a crypto currency in Switzerland.
BT: Yes. We looked at that. We also looked at Malta. Malta is very progressive in doing that, too. But Malta has a connotation of, let's say, Russian money—without being politically incorrect— but it was not the right connotation. We looked at Gibraltar. Gibraltar has a fully regulated exchange and it is UK compliant and EU compliant. We decided we'd go to Gibraltar because we would be fully regulated under two jurisdictions, and our marketing would be passported throughout the EU as well as around the world from Australia to South Africa.

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