Japan Bitcoin Ecosystem insight by Koji from Coinandpeace

If you want to read the original post in Japanese, click here. It is full of interesting insights that we cannot do justice to in this short post.

Recently, Japan’s #1 Bitcoin podcaster/ blogger Koji Higashi came to Singapore for a visit. During which, he met up with many local Bitcoiners and wrote a piece about the state of Bitcoin in Singapore, and compared it to his country – Japan. We decided to pull out some key insights from his great piece and share them with you!

Key Similarities:

  1. Exchanges seem to be the central players within the Bitcoin ecosystem in both countries. Other bitcoin-related services like remittances and credit card services are not very prominent in ecosystem as banking infrastructures are well-established. This means that most Japanese and Singaporeans have access to typical banking services and do not need bitcoin to fill that gap.

  2. In Japan, as in Singapore, banks are starting to focus on the block chain technology. (No surprise here.)

  3. With a shift of banks’ funds and interest towards blockchain technology, many in Singapore and Japan alike, are working on projects like private block chains, Ethereum-related projects and more.

Key Differences:

  1. The size of the bitcoin markets in the two countries are very different. Comparing the larger exchanges in Japan and in Singapore, the total daily transactions of BtcBox, largest exchange in Japan, is easily double of CoinHako’s monthly transaction. However, given the differences in population size, that comes as no surprise as well.

  2. Singapore’s government is more engaged with and welcoming to the bitcoin community and ecosystem than the Japanese government is. He also expressed surprise the power players from the blockchain-related companies were given “VIP treatment” by the Singaporean government.

  3. Singapore’s media is also more positive and knowledgeable about bitcoin in general. He says that Japanese media would have trouble understanding literature on bitcoin which is usually written in English, hence mistranslation and misinterpretation in Bitcoin-related discussion on the news does arise from time to time.

Interestingly, he also ended with a cool fun fact that many of our users might not know about. Hako is actually box is Japanese so CoinHako is actually Coinbox. Yes, we’ve been told that we are very original.