While most of the money invested in the early stages of cryptocurrencies was coming from Europe and the US, things have changed drastically. Southeast Asia and Asia in general have become leading investors in the crypto space, matching of the general public involvement and craze about crypto. Led by Singapore as the FinTech crypto heaven, Southeast Asia has been rising up in the crypto space, providing the world with some quite interesting projects. With lightly regulated crypto space and ICO space, this part of the world has become a Mecca for companies and institutions who want to be involved and associated with cryptocurrencies and the blockchain technology.

Regulations of ICOs

With the regulation of ICOs in the US, complete ban of ICOs in China and South Korea, Singapore and Japan have become the leading ICO “hosts” of current and future ICO projects in Asia. As of August of 2017, Singapore requires ICO token sellers to register a prospectus with MAS prior to their ICO and this has to be approved by MAS. This will soon be something similar to what the US did with the implementation to KYC in the crypto space. Read more about it here: https://www.abitgreedy.com/ico/.

Problems of Southeast Asia crypto space

Developing nations are being plagued with scams and Ponzi schemes in the crypto space. Knowing little to nothing about digital currencies, these schemes are able to spread like a noxious gas into their target victims: populations with an exclusive language and a booming middle class.Out of the 8 countries that Bitconnect targets, 6 fit the easy scam criteria: One language and an emerging middle class: Vietnam, Thailand, Cambodia, Indonesia, India and the Philippines.

Southeast Asia Crypto coins/tokens and startups to look for

Even with being a true blockchain developer at the moment, not many successful projects have risen from Southeast Asia part of the world yet. It is only a matter of time though, since the general involvement of public and other entities is high.

HERO token

With the ICO that has just successfully concluded, this token is a hidden gem in Southeast Asia. The project promotes financial inclusion, transparency and efficiency of banking and funding in Southeast Asia. Almost half of the global population is still unbanked or under banked which means they can’t reach out to banks for credit help when it comes to credits for small businesses, education and such.

 This project wants to make credit and banking more affordable and readily available for the unbanked and the under banked people. By utilizing blockchain and smart-contract tech, HERO aims to enable a network of services in the financial field be introduced to the unbanked and under banked people in the region. This project will try to promote financial transparency, inclusion and efficiency. They will do so by enabling transfer of HERO tokens to fiat currency, making it a transparent and an easy way to fund people in need. If it comes to life, it could be one of the most effective ways of crediting and funding the people without the option to be regularly banked and credited.

Digix Global / Digix DAO

With the constant need of stability in the crypto space, and untrustworthy activities of USDT (Tether) people have been looking for a new cryptocurrency that is stable and reliable. That made Singaporean Mr KC Ching to tokenize gold and peg the price of gold to a stable cryptocurrency model. That’s how Digix Global was born as a project, and DigixDAO (DGX/DGD) as a cryptocurrency. This would make every DGX capped to the price of 1 gram of solid 99% gold approved in the Singaporean vault. This could make a breakthrough for the crypto space, so watch out for it!

Toast

This project is an application that tries to form a way for migrants from Southeast Asia to, by using smartphones, remit money back to their country cheap and fast. The project is based out of Singapore.

Toast has raised $1,200,000 during seed funding round, which will help greatly in the continuance of the project.

BitX

Incorporated in Singapore, BitX is a bitcoin startup with offices in Jakarta and Cape Town.The company offers bitcoin wallet as well as an e-commerce solution for merchants. Bitx is currently in Singapore, and is a startup made in Jakarta and Cape Town. It was founded in 2013.

The project also tries to focus on exploring and exploiting Africa’s potential in the crypto world.

Besides that, BitX’s is one of the best and easiest to use wallets when it comes to Bitcoin wallet applications.

BitcoinIndonesia

It is a BTC exchange platform, with Southeast Asia as their main field of work. They are offering buying and selling cryptocurrencies for Rupiah. It’s considered one of the more trusted exchanges in Southeast Asia.

With military-grade cryptography protection, and fast deposits and withdrawals processing (maximum 12 hours) this makes the platform very competitive.

Lamixcoin

With cryptocurrencies being adopted more and more each day, India seems to be making its own cryptocurrency. It’s called Laxmicoin. It is a cryptocurrency created by Raj Dangi and Mitts Daki. Expected token economics show that the coins will probably have 30,000,000 tokens and will be on blockchain that has its code similar to BTC.

So far, unfortunately, India has been unsure of their involvement in the non-fiat currency so the launching of Lamixcoin has been postponed. If it goes live, we might see great demand for it in the huge market of India and Southeast Asia in general.

Final word

With the regulations hitting ICOs and blockchain developers all around the world, Southeast Asia remains determined to be included in the cryptocurrency space. Even so, the development of crypto inclusion and positive regulation is coming a bit slow, making the development part of the crypto sphere easy and convenient, but marketing and launching part of the project extremely difficult. Things will change for the better as long as Southeast Asia as a whole stays on the path of crypto involvement that they are on right now.

As for coins and ICOs coming from this part of the world, not many successful ones came to fruition, but we should expect a turn of tides. Many talented developers are working on so many crypto startups and projects, so it is only a matter of time until one of them hit the center of the mark!

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