Bitkub submits improvement plans to Thai SEC and resumes trading

Bitkub, Thailand’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, resumed its services on Saturday following a brief period of shutdown enforced by the country’s Securities and Exchange Commission. 

The shutdown followed a number of brief service outages that occurred due to large spikes in traffic when the price of Bitcoin (BTC) broke 1 million Thai baht ($33,340) earlier this month. The psychologically significant figure brought a huge influx of new investors to the site, which struggled to cope with the volume.

The SEC ordered the exchange to cease activities and revise operational procedures to improve reliability, with a deadline of Jan. 23. Bitkub complied and sent its improvement plan to the regulator on Saturday morning, meaning that it could resume trading through the website.

The SEC is now reviewing the plan, which includes doubling the number of support staff, improving Know Your Customer verification protocols, and setting up a 100 million Thai baht ($3.3 million) customer protection reserve.

Bitkub had forecast 600% growth in 2020, which actually ended up being as high as 1,000%. Its forecast of 1,000% growth for 2021 was broken within seven days of the new year

Cryptocurrency trading has exploded in Thailand during the recent bull market, with volumes across the six licensed exchanges in the country hitting 14.6 billion Thai baht ($487,000) for the period between Jan. 1 and Jan. 24.

This is despite the fact that three of the exchanges only gained their licenses and started to trade over the last week. Of these, Upbit Thailand, backed by Upbit APAC and a group of Thai billionaires, must have been hoping that it could make more of Bitkub’s temporary suspension from the market.