Japanese Crypto Exchange GMO Coin to Buy More Digital Tokens From Customers

GMO Coin, Japan’s popular cryptocurrency exchange and a wholly-owned subsidiary of GMO Internet is including more digital currencies to its loan-service that lets its customers to lend their digital currency holdings to the exchange.

Earlier last month, the company had announced the service only for Bitcoin wherein the exchange had detailed that this service “allows you to rent out the virtual currency held by the customer to the company so that you can receive the rental fee according to the quantity of the lent virtual currency.”

However, the company is now planning to extend this service to other digital currencies like Ethereum (ETH), Litecoin (LTC), Ripple (XRP) and Bitcoin Cash (BCH). Applications to avail these services have already started and will continue until the 23rd of May this month. If the company receives more applicants than they require, it will be using a draw system to decide from whom they want to borrow.

For the new digital currencies included, customers can lend between 100 and 1,000 ETH; 300 and 3,000 LTC; 100,000 and 1,000,000 XRP; and 50 and 500 BCH. The company has kept the maturity window at 150 days and says that at the end of the maturity period, customers will get their digital currency holdings back in the same type and amount.

GMO Coin will be paying its customers 2.04109589 ETH for each 100 ETH borrowed; 6.12328767 LTC for every 300 LTC; 2,041.0958 XRP for every 100,000 XRP; and 1.02054794 BCH for every 50 BCH. The crypto exchange said that this fee “corresponds to 5% / year (tax included),”  but further added that taxes will also be levied on the loan fees.

Apart from these services, the company is also involved in crypto mining activities. GMO Coin says that, till now, it has mined nearly 906 Bitcoin and 537 Bitcoin Cash. The company has recently reported its financial earnings for the first quarter which an operating loss of 760 million yen (~US$7 million). The operating loss for the exchange has grown by  560 million yen (~$5.1 million) over the previous quarter.

Following the hack of Coincheck exchange earlier this year, GMO Coin is one of those two companies receiving a business improvement order from Japan’s financial watchdog Financial Services Agency (FSA) during the inspection.