Charles Pyo, Founder and CEODriven by this massive cryptocurrency bubble, the year 2017 also marked the establishment of Chain Partners in Korea, with the philosophy of ‘building a healthy crypto financial institution in Asia.’ The company’s mission revolved around ‘making humanity happier’ through blockchain and cryptocurrency.
“One of our main focuses is to support United Nations’ Sustainable Development Plan in lowering global remittance fees from the current 7 percent to 3 percent by 2035,” says Charles Pyo, Founder and CEO of Chain Partners. While people in developed countries pay low remittance fees, there are 1.7 billion people around the world who do not have a bank account and are unable to make remittances. The cross-border payments, remittances, and currency exchanges can be made cheaper, safer, and less frictional through cryptocurrencies. “Although it sounds lofty, we are serious about achieving this goal,” quips Pyo, who has also been named as one of the top 25 young entrepreneurs in Asia by Bloomberg Business Week.
To that end, Pyo’s company today recognizes that there is more to the technology underlying cryptocurrencies than it meets the eye, and it would take more than a single boom cycle to bring more innovation to the field. “First, we have to overcome the regulatory landscape hurdles where many countries make it difficult for traders to freely exchange between digital and fiat currencies. Second is the challenge of solving the KYC/AML requirements to prevent traders from money laundering,” explains Pyo. In addition, beyond crypto exchanges for retail traders, the challenge is to identify equally promising business models for many industry participants, developers, and entrepreneurs.
“In our view, the crypto spot exchange market has consolidated around strong global and local players. The ranking of crypto exchanges, and their respective market shares, are stabilizing. Especially since crypto exchanges in Korea are about to receive licenses, for instance, and this will also help them widen their lead and on-board many more users,” explains Pyo. Therefore, as a venture startup, Chain Partners is constantly finding new opportunities to bridge the legacy financial world with the emerging world of digital assets.
The efforts are clearly visible in Chain Partners’ accomplishments. “Most of our milestones are launched as industry firsts, either from a technology point of view or a regulatory one,” mentions Pyo. For example, Chain Partners launched Coinduck, which appeared in the first batch of blockchain apps available to millions of Samsung’s flagship smartphone users.
The company was also the first to research STO (security token offerings), custody solutions, cloud mining, and produced the industry-leading analysis for the Bloomberg Terminal software. And, in order to enable companies to trade with secure counterparties, Chain Partners conducts thorough KYC/AML using Dow Jones’ risk and compliance solution, which is used by most banks around the world. “I believe these safety best practices and the trust that our clients have bestowed upon us are what keeps us years ahead of other crypto tech solution providers,” says Pyo.
Right now, Chain Partners is also preparing to launch a new kind of platform targeting B2B customers, which would help traders exchange, or swap, across a variety of digital assets and fiat currencies. Changer.io—Chain Partners’ cryptocurrency-fiat currency exchange platform featuring price competitiveness, will be released as a beta version in September 2020. The platform will bring the best exchange rates from more than 40 major banks around the world and all major Crypto over-the-counter (OTC) desks and cryptocurrency exchanges globally. It will be the first professional platform to stream pricing info for not just cryptos, but eventually, all fiat pairings. “We believe it is only when both crypto-to-crypto and crypto-to-fiat exchange work smoothly, we will be able to make the exchange of digital assets and fiat currencies more secure and broadly accepted,” states Pyo. Changer.io would be offered via a web app and API. Anyone will be able to trade at the best prices worldwide, and any company that wants to hedge a Bitcoin position can immediately grab a short position and square the position. In addition to cryptocurrencies, Changer.io will also add support for CBDC (Central Bank Digital Currency) and new digital currencies issued by companies such as Libra.
Nevertheless, explaining how Chain Partners is presently revolutionizing the cryptocurrency space for their clients, Pyo shares recent success stories of how they are helping public companies or institutional customers to securely trade cryptocurrency. For example, LINE and Kakao are large publicly-traded companies in Japan and Korea. These companies were reluctant to trade cryptocurrency directly. “When the counterparty is an individual, there isn’t a clear paper trail, and there are tax issues. With crypto, corporations do not know what to write in their financial statements,” says Pyo. Chain Partners’ OTC desk developed a compliant way to handle these types of transactions, and also guided the counterparties on how to properly handle taxes and financial statements. Together with that, a dedicated representative was appointed to provide support to the clients whenever they wanted. “We were also the first to provide market research to the clients, helping them trade in an actionable way,” informs Pyo.
These proven capabilities have made Chain Partners a real catalyst for change in the cryptocurrency market. Their clients are, therefore, able to trade larger transaction sizes more affordably than individual customers or exchanges. Chain Partners is making it possible through its partnerships with all major cryptocurrency OTC desks and multiple major foreign exchanges, “so we can find the lowest price for any digital asset at any moment in the world,” says Pyo. With many such global associations adding to its prowess, Chain Partners is now poised to meet the new needs in this dynamic and challenging environment and help businesses move to the next stage in the crypto financial market.
As a venture startup, Chain Partners is constantly finding new opportunities to bridge the legacy financial world with the emerging world of digital assets
Nevertheless, explaining how Chain Partners is presently revolutionizing the cryptocurrency space for their clients, Pyo shares recent success stories of how they are helping public companies or institutional customers to securely trade cryptocurrency. For example, LINE and Kakao are large publicly-traded companies in Japan and Korea. These companies were reluctant to trade cryptocurrency directly. “When the counterparty is an individual, there isn’t a clear paper trail, and there are tax issues. With crypto, corporations do not know what to write in their financial statements,” says Pyo. Chain Partners’ OTC desk developed a compliant way to handle these types of transactions, and also guided the counterparties on how to properly handle taxes and financial statements. Together with that, a dedicated representative was appointed to provide support to the clients whenever they wanted. “We were also the first to provide market research to the clients, helping them trade in an actionable way,” informs Pyo.
These proven capabilities have made Chain Partners a real catalyst for change in the cryptocurrency market. Their clients are, therefore, able to trade larger transaction sizes more affordably than individual customers or exchanges. Chain Partners is making it possible through its partnerships with all major cryptocurrency OTC desks and multiple major foreign exchanges, “so we can find the lowest price for any digital asset at any moment in the world,” says Pyo. With many such global associations adding to its prowess, Chain Partners is now poised to meet the new needs in this dynamic and challenging environment and help businesses move to the next stage in the crypto financial market.
