The goal of a new bitcoin exchange is to increase the domestic bitcoin liquidity base and facilitate remittance services in Vietnam.

Bitcoin Vietnam announced the relaunch of the bitcoin exchange in a press release issued on 22 September 2015. It was first opened in July 2014 in partnership with Bit2C Ltd. but eventually had to go offline. Since that time, the leadership of Bitcoin Vietnam planned to restart it. When asked recently by CoinFox about the plans for future development, Dominik Weil, the co-founder of Bitcoin Vietnam, answered: “Right now we are working on bringing back the live trading exchange VBTC which will serve as the necessary liquidity pool inside Vietnam.”

The new bitcoin exchange is created in partnership with Blinktrade and BitGo. It supports multisig wallets co-signed by all partners (in this case, three). To move the money, it is necessary to secure two signatures out of three. Besides, if BitGo fails to protect the wallet, it provides insurance.

But the main feature which, according to Bitcoin Vietnam, can make this bitcoin exchange successful is its accessibility to the unbanked Vietnamese which, according to the recent World Bank report, comprise about 70% of the population. Users will be able to deposit or withdraw cash in over 9,200 places in the country. Dominik Weil believes the new bitcoin exchange will facilitate remittances to Vietnam from abroad:

“In an ideal setup it will take you less than one hour to send funds to your beloved ones in Vietnam - from sending the Bitcoins to us until the recipient in Vietnam holds the cash in his hands. This is already possible today.”

For Blinktrade, it is a new link in the chain of bitcoin exchanges across the globe. Rodrigo Souza, the co-founder of Blinktrade, says the company has already helped to build bitcoin exchanges in Brazil, Venezuela, Chile and Pakistan. Blinktrade helps these exchanges link with remittance companies in the U.S. to reduce remittance costs and increase their speed.

Vietnam ranks in the Top 10 of remittance destination countries, receiving more than $12 billion annually.

Alexey Tereshchenko