In April 2024, Zhou Wei, the former chief financial officer of the cryptocurrency exchange Binance, spent US$200 million to buy the cryptocurrency wallet provider Coins.PH from the Indonesian technology giant GOJEK. This cryptocurrency wallet provider was founded in 2014 and was acquired by GOJEK in January 2019 for US$95 million.
Now Zhou Wei has a new plan immediately after acquiring Coins.PH, which is to launch a cryptocurrency stablecoin PHPC based on the Philippine Peso in the Philippine market, that is, 1PHPC=1 Philippine Peso. (Note: The current exchange rate is 1CNY=7.97PHP or 1USD=57.58PHP)
There are currently many stablecoins in the cryptocurrency field, the largest of which is the U.S. dollar stablecoin USDT, as well as the U.S. dollar stablecoin USDC, etc. TEDA also launched a Mexican peso-based cryptographic stablecoin MXNT in Mexico.
However, the market for cryptocurrency stablecoins is still very large, because there are still a large number of legal currencies that do not have corresponding cryptocurrency stablecoins, so Coins.PH launched PHPC in the Philippines to gain market share.
Of course, now that it has been approved by the regulatory agency, Filipino users can quickly buy and sell PHPC and exchange it for other cryptocurrencies through Coins.PH, which should be good news for Filipino investors.
It is worth noting that as early as April, the Central Bank of the Philippines had approved Coins.PH to launch an experimental PHPC license. Zhou Wei said that the platform would provide PHPC transactions to Philippine investors in June.
The Philippines announced earlier that it would ban the cryptocurrency exchange Binance because Binance conducts business in the Philippines without approval from Philippine regulators, including providing cryptocurrency trading and cryptocurrency derivatives, which may cause losses to Filipino investors.
The current approval of the Philippine peso’s crypto stablecoin is a test. It is a public test under the full supervision of the regulatory agency to evaluate the benefits of the crypto stablecoin in the real world. If there are no problems after the test, the Philippine central bank will approve the official launch of the PHPC stablecoin. Otherwise, the test will be ended and the continued issuance and use of PHPC will not be allowed.
There are a lot of remittances in the Philippines. It seems that the Philippines hopes to provide an additional remittance method for expatriates to improve convenience and reduce remittance fees. However, the Philippines did not disclose the specific purpose of this test.