In a report by local newspaper Australian Financial Review on July 12, the Australian-based brokerage platform SelfWealth is planning to add cryptocurrencies to its system. They are in talks with different crypto exchanges in a bid to add the functionality for trading crypto assets.
The company plans to include 10 different cryptocurrencies including Bitcoin (BTC) and Ether (ETH) which will be placed in an integrated third-party wallet by the end of this year. Like its traditional equities trades, SelfWealth will charge a flat percentage fee for every crypto transaction it conducts on behalf of its clients.
In a report by crypto news site CoinDesk, SelfWealth CEO Cath Whitaker said that the buying and selling of crypto along with trading of local and United States-based shares through the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX)’s Clearing House Electronic Sub register System (CHESS) is an ‘Australian first’.
In other countries such as the United States, platforms like Robinhood have allowed traders to buy shares and crypto in one place. However, this has not yet been done in Australia until SelfWealth’s proposed project.
Moreover, Whitaker mentioned in the same interview with CoinDesk that ‘moving between popular investment types usually requires access to multiple trading platforms and for investors to move money multiple times’.
SelfWealth hopes to change its old CHESS system with a distributed ledger technology to speed up the settlement process and transactions. However, there has not been significant progress in this regard since ASX pushed back its launch date for its blockchain-based clearing system until April 2023, according to a report by global news provider Reuters on October 28, 2020.
Despite the increasing demand for faster and more convenient transactions, ASX was not able to finish its project and has not mentioned any updates to this day.
SelfWealth is an ASX registered company that is one of the nation’s largest non-bank online brokerage platforms with over 95,000 investors. It currently has around US$4.4 billion in the total value of securities on its platform.
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