Leading Japanese financial institution SBI holdings recently confirmed the launch of its cryptocurrency exchange which is called VCTRADE. The initial announcement about the development of the platform and expected launch was made 15 months earlier, which was back in 2016.

Japanese financial giant revealed in its recent announcement that they will be focusing on trading XRP at the beginning. Meanwhile, there were no precise timelines stated for the future development directions of the platform however it will reportedly soon be supporting bitcoin cash (BCH) as well.

As known, SBI Holdings earlier partnered with Ripple and is currently jointly operating the company SBI Ripple Asia. The aim of this company is to explore the uses of Ripple’s blockchain in foreign exchange and money transfers among banks.

The recent official announcement also informed that XRP/JPY trading will be possible to perform on the platform with no transaction fees. Users will reportedly be charged upon retrieving Japanese yen in the form of withdrawal fees.

Currently there are 20,000 pre-registered users for whom the platform will be available at launch, while wider public will have an access to the exchange only next month, in July 2018.

Back in September 2017, platform’s launch was postponed based on the statement by SBI on further need to strengthen its cybersecurity safeguards prior to launch. The well-known delay by SBI was announced a month after the infamous theft of NEM tokens from Tokyo-based cryptocurrency exchange, Coincheck, which was reportedly worth $530 million.

SBI, which is Japan’s biggest bitcoin exchange, later invested in bitFlyer. The company further on in March, announced about having a 40% ownership in Taiwanese crypto hardware wallet developer CoolBitX. Although the information has not been confirmed, this partnership was forecasted to aim at using CoolBitX’s cold-wallet technology by SBI in order to store customers’ crypto assets.