ECUREX, a digital finance marketplace for professional traders and financial institutions headquartered in Zurich, announced that it has become the first digital currency exchange platform to be fully compliant with the Swiss Banking Act. ECUREX has also been the first digital currency exchange platform to be compliant with the Swiss Anti-Money Laundering (AML) Act since April 2014.
Switzerland considers digital currencies such as bitcoin equivalent to any other foreign currency. This means that the professional operation of Bitcoin trading platforms constitutes financial intermediation with the requirement to comply with both the Banking Act and the AML Act.
“Switzerland probably has the most challenging regulatory environment for such a business and we are thrilled to be the first with a business model that allows us to operate here,” said ECUREX CEO Paolo Tasca. “We think a stable regulatory environment is not only beneficial for us in the long term, but also for our customers.”
The ECUREX trading system is not yet operating, but the team announced that this is the next important milestone. Within the next three to five years, the objective of ECUREX is to become the leading European digital finance hub for professional traders and financial institutions interested in digital currencies and blockchain technologies.
“By observing the current trend in blockchain innovation, in the near future we envision a landscape where this disruptive technology will create more agile and disintermediated financial and economic systems,” Tasca said in an interview with Bitcoin Magazine. “Blockchain technology will dramatically transform our economic systems, and our society in general, into something very different to what we have got used to thinking about in the last few decades. The disrupting force of the blockchain technology will hugely expand the use of digital currencies, because digital currencies and blockchain technology are an indissoluble tuple.”
He added that in the coming years banknotes, coins, checks and credit cards will all become hugely inefficient and will be replaced by digital money, which is easier and faster to process. According to recent studies, by 2020 90 percent of all payment transactions made in the United States and more than 50 percent of those made in Europe will be cashless.
Recently, the Denmark Central Bank declared that it will be discontinuing the printing of new fiat in 2016. Moreover, 45 percent of 25-34 year olds in the United States say they feel comfortable with the idea of using independently issued currencies.
At the moment there are more than four thousand privately issued currencies in more than 35 countries, and from 2009, when bitcoin was deployed in the market, there are now almost 500 different digital currencies.
“We glimpse a future characterized by the creation and diffusion of ‘brand’ currencies that will be used in closed-form environments as tools for internal rewarding, customer loyalty programs or incentive and governance schemes,” said Tasca. “ECUREX will be the single marketplace where users will instantly trade a massive range of online and offline, centralized and decentralized currencies cheaply and instantly.”
The ECUREX platform targets primarily professional traders and financial institutions, and provides professional tools like technical indicators for chart analyses, the possibility to trade from charts, multiple drawing and annotation tools, market data, reports by ECUREX Research, network data, price and trading news, and sentiment Indices.
The goal of ECUREX Research, part of the New Finance European research consortium, is to keep innovating by identifying the most important trends in nascent digital economies, but also to push boundaries on topics such as decentralized finance, economic networks, and generally to conduct cutting-edge research at the border between economics and complex systems that will benefit the community as a whole.
“At ECUREX Research, we believe that applied and fundamental research are complementary and yield benefits for the company, the industry and the world, and we have a long-term vision for independently funded, transdisciplinary science,” said Tasca.
ECUREX will distinguish itself from leading Bitcoin exchanges such as Bitstamp and Coinbase because instead of focusing only on bitcoin, ECUREX will allow users to trade in real-time and high-frequency different pairs of crypto-to-crypto and crypto-to-fiat.
“At the moment there exist about 500 different digital currencies,” said Tasca. “The digital currency market is so young that we welcome a Hayek’s regime of competitive monies where in the coming few years different digital currency protocols will co-exist to serve different needs. This is why we consider ourselves as a digital finance marketplace, and not a bitcoin-restricted exchange.”
Photo Rob Pongsajapan / CC BY 2.0
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