The Philippine Stock Exchange (PSE) is aiming to be first in line when financial regulators give the green light for crypto asset trading in the country.
On Friday, July 2, CNN reported that PSE president and CEO Ramon Monzon said the local bourse should be the country’s first exchange platform for crypto assets. He stated:
“If there should be any exchange for cryptos, it should be done at the PSE. Why? Number one, it’s because we have the trading infrastructure. But more importantly, we’ll be able to have investor protection safeguards especially with a product like crypto.”
The country’s stock exchange is now awaiting guidelines from the Philippine Securities and Exchange Commission and other financial regulators.
Despite his eagerness to support crypto asset markets, Monzon warned of crypto’s volatility, stating: “instant riches could be instant poverty too.”
Related:Crypto in the Philippines: Necessity is the mother of adoption
Government regulators in the Phillipines began researching regulating crypto asset trading in 2019 when the SEC sought feedback from banks, investors, and the public on whether the country was ready to build a fully-fledged cryptocurrency exchange.
Local demand for digital payments is strong, with as much as 10% of the GDP coming from remittances from an estimated 10 million expatriate Filipinos working overseas.
The Philippines has sought to establish itself as a regional hub for crypto in recent years, opening its Special Economic Zones in Cagayan to crypto firms in 2018.
In January, the central bank established new guidelines for crypto asset service providers after witnessing accelerated growth in the use of digital assets over the past three years.
by Pankaj Gupta, VP Engineering and Site Lead, India
I joined Coinbase about two months ago to establish and lead a new tech hub for Coinbase in India. In this blog post, I wanted to share a bit about our plans and ambitions in India and how we are thinking about this hub in general.
There’s never been a more exciting time for builders working in crypto. This is true worldwide, but especially in India which is seeing a boom in crypto-native talent and in creating and growing important crypto projects — Polygon and Instadapp to name just a couple. It is of course well known that India has a vibrant, world class community of software engineers, technology builders and entrepreneurs. To add to this, we have been pleasantly surprised at the growing expertise in crypto and blockchain technologies as well.
Building a high quality tech hub
Coinbase is fully committed to expanding the understanding of crypto and blockchains in the region. It is early days for our India tech hub but it has already taken off with an incredible amount of interest in our open roles from across India. We have ambitious plans for this hub in the near future — we want to hire hundreds of world class engineers in the near term. This team of engineers will be complemented by equally high quality product and design teams, as well as support functions such as recruiting and HR to build out a sustainable, well-rounded tech hub. One of our cherished cultural tenets is top talent in every seat — so even though we wish to hire in large numbers, we are proud to say that each of these new hires is and will be among the topmost talent available anywhere in the world.
To support our ambitious growth plans in India, we are also exploring startup acquisitions and acquihires. Founders who might be interested in joining Coinbase’s journey and mission, please contact me.
Coinbase is an ambitious and fast-moving company. As we build our presence in India from scratch, this is an incredible opportunity to work in a start-up-like, fast growing environment. The crypto space — together with its terminology, its protocols, projects, tokens, etc. — is a whole new exciting universe with new stuff to learn about every day. For me, it is frankly like being a kid in a candy store — or a mithai shop if you will — every day 🙂
Independent and autonomous charters in exciting deep tech areas
We have intentionally planned out a continuously learning environment and an org structure to maximise learning, growth and impact. We will have teams in all major areas Coinbase works in today — infrastructure, cloud, platform, payments, crypto, blockchains, data engineering, machine learning, growth, product engineering — to name just a few. These teams in India will be led by local engineering directors, who will have large, independent and autonomous charters. They are being intentionally set up for local decision-making to optimise for impact and velocity. These teams will work on a combination of projects that support both our global products and systems, as well as projects in the greater APAC region. We believe this will increase the speed, empowerment, and local decision making, as well as provide a sustainable and better quality of work life for all our teams worldwide.
In order to be fully functioning, independent and fast-moving, we are also hiring roles — both senior and junior — across product management, user experience, design and program management. In addition, we’re creating a core support team — in areas such as in HR and recruiting — to provide well-rounded support for our India hub.
Flexible and modern work environment, with plenty of perks
Given our remote-first strategy, we offer a truly flexible and modern work environment. That means that we’re hiring from all parts of India in order to find the best talent wherever they are or choose to work from in the country. We plan to complement this with physical offices in key cities as well to have a hybrid, flexible environment. In addition to the challenging and meaningful work, we also provide top tier perks and compensation, which allows us to ensure we have top talent in every seat across the company.
As a product led company, it’s important that our new hires in India truly understand the products and services that they are helping to deliver. That’s why we’re introducing a new program called CIkka — short for “Coinbase India Sikka” — offering each new employee in India a one-time $1000 in crypto when they start. Our expectation is that they’ll leverage this offering to learn about crypto, and will use this knowledge to help us build the next generation of products that will delight our customers around the world.
Want to do challenging work that has worldwide impact?
So, what types of employees are we looking for? We want to hire nimble and innovative people who want to make an impact and contribute to our mission of increasing economic freedom in the world. We’re looking for builders, who want to create products that will drive the global cryptoeconomy forward. We have built a culture of sustained innovation in the company, exemplified by Project 10%, where we dedicate 10% of our resources to supporting big product bets.
To learn more about our innovative culture, please review this recent post from our co-founder and CEO, Brian Armstrong. In it, he outlines our cultural tenets that describe how we treat each other and operate day-to-day at the company. If you’re interested in joining us on our mission, please visit our hiring website and apply for our open positions in India.
Building Crypto Out of India was originally published in The Coinbase Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
CoinJar, a popular Australian-based bitcoin/crypto exchange, today announced it has listed six new coins including BAL, ENJ, GRT, MATIC, ESDT, and WBTC. From today, users will be able to buy and sell all of these coins on CoinJar; joining the 24 cryptocurrencies that users can already trade, store and send.
Six New Listings
Balancer (BAL)
Enjin (ENJ)
The Graph (GRT)
Polygon/Matic (MATIC)
Tether (USDT)
Wrapped Bitcoin (WBTC)
Balancer (BAL)
An automated market maker (AMM) built on the Ethereum blockchain, similar to Uniswap and Curve. Users earn the BAL token by creating and maintaining liquidity pools. BAL tokens are governance tokens, meaning that they give holders the right to take part in decisions regarding the network. As these decisions often involve rewards and fees being generated by the Balancer protocol, there’s a financial incentive to hold and participate.
Enjin (ENJ)
One one of the pioneers of non-fungible tokens (NFTs). NFTs are one-of-a-kind markers that allow the holder to prove absolute ownership of a digital asset. Through a process known as minting, Enjin makes it easy to create NFTs on the Ethereum blockchain. ENJ is the currency that powers this process, allowing holders to both mint and “melt” NFTs.
The Graph (GRT)
The Graph describes itself as “a protocol for organizing blockchain data and making it easily accessible. The Graph creates an open marketplace where information from different blockchains can be sold to developers who may require it to power their own smart contracts. The Graph Token (GRT) is the currency that powers this marketplace, offering incentives for those that index, curate, and sell the data.
Polygon/Matic (MATIC)
A fast, cross-blockchain dApp development platform built on Ethereum. Like the ETH token, MATIC is the fuel that powers the Polygon network, facilitating the payment and settlement of transactions. Polygon uses a Proof-of-Stake consensus mechanism, which means that holders of the token can “stake” their tokens and receive more MATIC in return.
Tether (USDT)
Pegged in value to the US dollar, Tether allowed people to buy and sell cryptocurrency at a time when it was difficult for exchanges to find reliable banking and fiat currency partners. Cut to 2021 and the stablecoin market is booming, with more than USD $100 billion in circulation. But Tether remains the biggest player by far, accounting for more than 60% of the market and essentially functioning as the crypto world’s reserve currency.
Wrapped BTC (WBTC)
An invention of the DeFi movement. Pegged to the same value as Bitcoin itself, WBTC is a way of representing Bitcoin ownership on the Ethereum network (i.e. you lock Bitcoin in a smart contract and receive an equivalent amount of WBTC in return). Having WBTC means you can use the Bitcoin you own on DeFi apps, for instance, to purchase tokens on Uniswap or as liquidity pool collateral on a platform like Compound or Balancer.
