A former NYMEX president plans to create a cryptocurrency exchange for institutional investors and broker-dealers. The new exchange will be based in Chicago and will operate with large cryptos, like Bitcoin and Ripple.
J. Robert Collins Jr., who served as president of the New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX), wants to create a cryptocurrency exchange firm for brokers and professional investors interested in trading digital currencies like Bitcoin or Ripple, Bloomberg reports.
The San Juan Mercantile Exchange, as the venture is called, is expected to launch in October of this year. Collins revealed that his new entity is meant to increase reliability in the cryptocurrency space, something that most of the current exchanges cannot achieve.
Collins said:
“From a fiduciary standpoint, there’s almost no one taking chances with existing crypto websites. What we want to prepare for and help facilitate is when a really large broker dealer wants to give access to their millions of clients but they want to do it in a safe and sound, secure way, run by professionals.”
Even though the deadline is several months from now, the exchange lacks many key components. Collins revealed that he hadn’t obtained any financing for his exchange and he hadn’t made a deal with a digital custody firm yet.
According to him, the exchange is aimed at institutional investors in the first place. Thus, only accredited investors who own a percentage of the new venture and go through KYC and AML verification procedures will be eligible for trading.
The new venture will apply its own software that is expected to process 1.5 million transactions per seconds or billions of USD each day. To give you a reference, Binance claims that it handles 1.4 million transactions per seconds.
Besides the exchange, Collins wants to launch the San Juan Mercantile Bank and Trust, which will be used to store USD deposits from members. The bank will be headquartered in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Thus, it will be regulated by the country’s Office of the Commissioner of Financial Institutions and also by the US Department of Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network under the Bank Secrecy Act.
To avoid the requirements of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which said that crypto exchanges listing digital tokens resembling securities had to register with the agency, Collins stated that his venture would operate with digital currencies like Bitcoin or Ripple. The latter fall under the radar of the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) as commodities.
Read more at:
https://cryptovest.com/news/binance-and-coinbase-beware-a-new-challenger-is-coming/
