Japan: Financial Watchdog to Issue Business Improvement Notices to 5 Crypto Exchanges

Japan’s Financial Services Agency (FSA) will be issuing business improvement notices to five registered cryptocurrency exchanges by the end of this week, Cointelegraph Japan reports Tuesday, June 19.

According to the FSA inspections, crypto exchanges BitFlyer, Quoine, Bitbank, BITPoint Japan, and BtcBox do not have the proper internal management systems, including their measures to prevent money laundering. BitFlyer, Quoine and Bitbank are some of the largest crypto exchanges both in the country and in the world, currently sitting at 27th, 18th and 20th places by trade volume, according to Coinmarketcap data.

When asked about the business improvement notices, BITPoint Japan told Cointelegraph Japan that there is “no such fact at the present time,” BitFlyer said they are “not in a position to comment,” Bitbank and Quoine said they could not answer, and BtcBox did not respond to a request for comment by press time.

Following the January $532 million hack of NEM from Japanese crypto exchange Coincheck, the FSA had begun inspections of crypto exchanges, issuing multiple business improvement notices and halting the operations of several exchanges as well.

Since April 2017, all crypto exchanges in Japan must be registered with an FSA license to operate. At the beginning of June, the FSA rejected a crypto exchange license application for the first time, citing concerns that the exchange — whose services had already been suspended twice this spring — didn’t provide adequate customer identity verification in the case of suspicious transactions.