Hotbit Korea lists Bitcoin SV and allows direct BSV-fiat trading

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Hotbit Korea has listed two Bitcoin SV (BSV) pairs on its platform, starting September 4. The move signals the original Bitcoin is gradually gaining more acceptance, despite problems with name recognition and disinformation campaigns from competitor cartels.

The platform will initially offer pairs of BSV/BTC and BSV/KRW (Korean won). The latter gives the option of a direct BSV-fiat gateway to Korean customers, something which would make trading more popular.

https://twitter.com/Hotbit_Korea/status/1301691448455081985

Hotbit Korea, which began operating in June 2020, is a local subsidiary of popular digital asset exchange company Hotbit Global. Hotbit Global launched in January 2018 and is registered in Estonia and Hong Kong. It quickly became a high-volume exchange listing over 250 digital assets, and says it has gained regulatory approval to operate in several countries including Estonia, United States, Canada, and Australia.

Hotbit Korea will be able to share Hotbit Global’s liquidity, giving it extra trading depth. Hotbit Global has supported BSV on its platform from the very early days, and adding it to local versions shows the company recognizes BSV as a popular asset with its customers.

Bitcoin has spent most of its life as BSV in the top 10 digital currencies by market cap, dropping to #12 in the past couple of weeks as previously-outsider and new assets like Chainlink, Polkadot, and Crypto.com Coin suddenly entered the upper echelons.

South Korea has long been a hotbed of activity for digital asset trading and startup projects. There has been particular interest in BSV there, especially following last year’s CoinGeek conference event in Seoul. One prominent project is Buskon, an online music/media store using BSV to help artists get discovered and monetize their creations.

BSV’s uphill battle in Asia

BSV has so far been missing from several Asia-based exchanges. Though there is interest in Japan, tight regulations and rules that restrict local exchanges to a very small list of “approved” digital assets have kept it off all platforms in the country. A number of local exchanges have privately expressed a desire to list BSV when it becomes possible.

With China (officially) off the exchange map, South Korea is now the largest market in Asia where BSV can be traded on a regulated platform. Though Hotbit Korea accounts are available only to those who can show Korean residence, others will no doubt be watching its volumes there.

Otherwise, BSV has frequently had to counter disinformation campaigns from other projects using the “Bitcoin name”, namely BTC and BCH. The latter is one of Japan’s approved trading assets, and it remains popular there as well as in China, where many block reward miners switched to BCH after the 2017 split with BTC.

However, one campaign that hasn’t had much impact on price or publicity was the “delist BSV” effort in early 2018. Led by Binance and Kraken, it saw BSV removed from Binance’s exchange in a move that was more ideological than practical. Other exchanges, such as OKEx and FloatSV, seized the opportunity to grab a share of Binance’s disappointed customers, and did exactly that.

Exchanges listings are valuable as attention-grabbers, though it’s important to remember that Bitcoin does not strive to be a speculative asset. The project focuses on massive data processing capacity and real-world utility, and anyone who’s been in Bitcoin for several years knows that market hype can only be empty and temporary unless Bitcoin is integrated into the global economy in a meaningful way. Those without Bitcoin’s feature set or scalability are left only with a tradeable asset, with few reasons to use it outside exchanges.

Hotbit Korea, with its direct BSV-to-fiat trading, will at least give local customers and easier option to buy and sell BSV, something that will likely encourage more to take a look.