SINGAPORE – Singapore investors accounted for 5 per cent of the Web traffic to FTX.com, based on the number of monthly unique visitors from January to October 2022, making them the second-largest group of users of the site.
An average of 241,675 unique users from Singapore visited the now-collapsed crypto exchange each month, data from crypto data aggregator CoinGecko shows.
South Korea saw the highest traffic share of 6.1 per cent, with 297,229 unique users on average visiting FTX.com monthly, across desktop and mobile Web apps.
Japan placed third, accounting for 4.6 per cent of Web traffic to the Bahamas-based exchange, or 223,513 unique users each month.
Billions in crypto investor funds were lost in a matter of days early in November, when FTX collapsed after a crippling liquidity crunch rendered the exchange insolvent.
The shuttering of FTX’s largest competitor, Binance, in Singapore back in December 2021 saw Binance users here switching to FTX. This may explain why Singapore ranks high on the list of countries affected by FTX’s stunning implosion, CoinGecko said.
CoinGecko’s study looked at monthly unique visitors and traffic share by country on FTX.com via desktop and mobile devices from January to October 2022, based on data from Web analytics platform SimilarWeb.
Other Asian markets accounting for the highest volume of FTX users include Taiwan, India, Thailand, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Vietnam and Indonesia.
FTX’s other marks of credibility include it being backed by Singapore’s Temasek, which has since written down its $275 million investment in the exchange. Japanese investment giant SoftBank invested US$100 million (S$138 million) in FTX earlier in 2022.
The Monetary Authority of Singapore said on Monday that while both Binance and FTX were not licensed in Singapore, Binance had been actively soliciting users here, which is a “possible contravention” of the Payment Services Act. The regulator first placed Binance on the Investor Alert List in September last year.
FTX, however, was not placed on the alert list as there was no evidence of the company soliciting users in Singapore and it did not offer trades in Singapore dollars.
But Singapore users were still able to access online FTX services, and the regulator said it was not possible to ring-fence the assets that Singapore investors chose to put up with FTX, nor ensure that the company backed them with reserves, as FTX is unlicensed.
THE BUSINESS TIMES
