Thailand's Oldest Bank Acquires Majority Stake In Local Crypto Exchange

The Siam Commercial Bank — Thailand's oldest bank — acquired a majority stake in local cryptocurrency exchange Bitkub.

What To Know: The Siam Commercial Bank paid 17.85 billion baht ($536.6 million) for the Bitkub stake, according to Tuesday's announcement. The transaction is expected to be carried out before the end of the first quarter of 2022, pending approval by financial regulators.

Why It's Important: Bitkub is licensed by Thailand’s Securities and Exchange Commission and its trading volume exceeded $30 billion from January to September. This data makes it the country's largest crypto exchange with a market share of over 90%.

That being said, regulators started to view Bitkub less favorably after its trading platform saw multiple outages in January — one of which lasted 16 hours. Regulators gave the firm five days to fix the problems that caused three outages that month as the trading volume increased, according to reports.

Price Action: As of press time, Bitcoin is trading at $64,028 after seeing its price increase by 3.63% over the last 24 hours according to CoinMarketCap.

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