Quoine-owned Liquid ties up with Virtual Currency Partners to enter US market

Crypto trading platform Liquid has established a joint venture with Virtual Currency Partners to break into the US market.

The Japanese platform launched by Quoine last September revealed that the new joint venture will be called Liquid Financial USA.

“The United States is one of the world’s largest markets for the virtual currency industry, and our community and clients and institutional investors are widely interested in providing services in the US market,” Kariya Kashimoro, co-founder and CEO of Liquid Group, said in a press release (via online translation).

The new venture has already acquired cloud-based data platform iQx, which is registered with the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN). Following regulatory approval, Liquid Finance USA is planning to enable US customers to use and trade its own native token, QASH.

“After nearly a year of studying the cryptocurrency space and researching a number of players, we were extremely impressed with Liquid and the strong foundation it built for itself as Japan’s first FSA-approved cryptocurrency exchange and one of the top 5 cryptocurrency exchanges in the world,” Barry Schiffman, VCP Chairman, said (as quoted by Finance Magnates).

Currently, Liquid Financial USA is pushing to get regulatory approvals across the United States. The company, with offices in New York and Atlanta, is now building out its team. It plans to start onboarding US clients by January 2020.

The announcement came after the Japan Financial Service Agency-licensed company surpassed the $1 billion unicorn startup valuation milestone last month. The latest round of funding was led by investment company IDG Capital with participation from cryptocurrency mining giant Bitmain Technologies.

Liquid said that the fund from the Series C funding will be used to expand worldwide, develop products for core trading exchange business, and enter into the security token market.