France, Israel and Estonia Move Forward with Crypto Adoption

Three recent big developments in world adoption of cryptocurrency indicate more and more interest in offering services to crypto investors. The developments come from Israel, France, and Estonia, supported by news from Russia and the US.

Israel had renewed its crypto legal rules back in 2016, and has now granted a license to crypto exchange Bits of Gold to operate the first virtual asset service provider (VASP) service. Now Bits of Gold can gain access to the conventional finance industry. The first service will be a wallet that will come with insurance. Another service will allow traditional banks and fintech services to provide access to digital currencies.

Estonia has also granted the first VASP license to Striga after its newly revamped regulations. The rules include KYC and capital mandates and affiliation to Estonia. The country has put in place an anti-money laundering and anti-terrorism act, thus laying the field for a VASP license to be granted. A VASP must have a minimum capital of around 125-350K Euros.

In France, Societe Generale is a large bank, and given the interest in investors to include bitcoin and cryptocurrencies as part of their portfolio, the bank will allow its asset managers to create funds that include cryptocurrencies. A statement from the bank said that investors have wanted inclusion of digital assets in their portfolios. Following this, a fund manager called Arquant Capital SAS will launch a bitcoin fund.

Russia, recently earning more wrath for its aggressive stance, has a new draft bill that aims to use bitcoin for international trade settlements. A report from the news agency Tass mentions that that bill indicates how to buy and transact with cryptocurrencies and to settle trades, as well as the do’s and don’ts. Russia has been facing sanctions, and realizes that it can’t carry out global trading without the use of cryptocurrencies.

Finally, in the US, Nasdaq has shown interest in launching a wallet service for bitcoin and other tokens, thus joining the competition with Gemini, Coinbase and BitGo. Until now, it has been allowing these players facilities to trade and make use of market surveillance tech.

Sometime back, Nasdaq had collaborated with Brazil’s XP to launch a crypto exchange in the country.

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