The Japan’s Financial Services Agency (FSA) have issued initial guidelines for funds wanting to invest in cryptocurrencies

The announcement was actually released on September 30th but obviously was in Japanese so we had to wait for the translation. The crypto industry in Japan is much more friendly and well accepted in comparison to other developed nations. Now the Japanese regulators have taken it one step further and they are looking to regulate funds.

“It is anticipated that financial products that invest in crypto assets (virtual currency) will be formed in the future,” the agency notes in the introduction to the proposed revisions to Supervision Guidelines. “But there are also indications that investment in crypto assets is encouraging speculation. The agency believes that it should carefully handle the formation and sale of investment trusts that invest in such assets.”

When looking through the documents it seems the main area of worry is the liquidity and volatility of the assets and they refer to risky assets as “non-specific assets.”.  

The country has had its issues, the collapse of Mt Gox in 2014 and the 2018 hack of the Coincheck exchange are the two main instances hat come to mind.

The FSA have  been working to reestablish the crypto market on a better footing. The  FSA has been fine-tuning the regulatory framework for exchanges and establishing a framework for crypto offerings and things seem much safer.