chepicap.com
According to Coin Hills, the Japanese Yen has ousted the USD as the global currency used most for trading Bitcoin for the past 24 hours.
The Bitcoinist pointed to this trend earlier today, predicting the switch in dominant trading pairs, pointing to crypto friendly laws in Japan which account in part for the outsized impact on the crypto market of Asian policy and markets. In fact, just yesterday Takeshi Fujimaki, a senior Japanese legislator and lifelong banker released a statement urging the relaxation of Japanese crypto tax laws. Nasdaq reported on the proposal, stating these types of measures ‘may be the boost that an already-robust industry needs to become a major world player in crypto.’ The fact that the JPY/BTC trading pair overtook the USD/BTC pair gives credence to this prediction.
While the Japanese yen has an increasingly prominent role in crypto trading, the Korean won has cooled off in the same period remarkably, only accounting for 2% of the Bitcoin trading market, down from about 50% earlier in the year.
Commentators have begun noting that Korea’s crypto craze is in fact coming to a close. Earlier this week, Quartz noted that Korea is moving from cryptocurrency into general blockchain development after a huge groundswell of interest in digital currencies led almost half of the adult population to invest. The dwindling of the KRW/BTC trading pair indicates that the intense interest in crypto is coming to a close, but the country is still awash in a blockchain fever, hoping to implement blockchain-based voting in government institutions, and blockchain technology in industrial and financial applications.