Coins.ph CEO relaunches Philippine crypto exchange, unveils DeFi wallet ambitions

Wei Zhou, CEO of fintech firm Coins.ph, has an unenviable job: convince the world that his crypto exchange is not like all the other platforms that have burned to the ground this year.

Coins Pro, which was originally introduced in 2018, will be officially relaunched this month – only nine months after Zhou led a consortium along with Joffre Capital to buy Coins.ph from Indonesian super app Gojek for nearly US$200 million.

Nine months after purchasing Coins.ph, CEO Wei Zhou (front row, in blue jacket and white shirt) will relaunch Coins Pro, the company’s centralized crypto exchange. / Photo credit: Coins.ph

Under Zhou’s leadership, the Philippines-based company removed its old vendor and has been rebuilding the exchange and upgrading the firm’s tech stack.

But Coins.ph was acquired in April 2022, before most non-crypto users had ever heard of TerraLabs or FTX. The two platforms made headlines for their spectacular collapses, which have put crypto markets in turmoil since May.

When asked about the timing of the relaunch, Zhou takes a pause.

“How do I say this … I think people will only want to trade on regulated exchanges where they know they’re protected by law, or they want to trade on decentralized exchanges where they know they’re protected by code,” he tells Tech in Asia.

To be fair, many of FTX’s subsidiaries did hold a patchwork of global licenses, Zhou says. But FTX’s former CEO Sam Bankman-Fried, who was arrested on Tuesday in the Bahamas on charges of defrauding investors in the US, has since acknowledged compliance efforts by FTX were a sham. Earlier, when he was asked about regulators, Bankman-Fried had responded with his now-infamous quip: “Yeah, just PR. Fuck regulators. They make everything worse. They don’t protect customers at all.”

Zhou, on the other hand, promotes Coins.ph as a fully regulated enterprise and has talked up the benefit of holding four licenses issued by Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP), the Philippines’ central bank.

Three licenses that were obtained earlier allow Coins.ph to offer electronic money, remittances and transfers, and virtual currency and exchange services.

On December 13, BSP issued the Advanced Electronic Payment and Financial Services (EPFS) license to Coins.ph, which covers the operations of the Coins Pro exchange. Coins Pro was previously released as a beta version under the company’s existing licenses and was not available to all users.

Zhou also says that Coins.ph’s assets and liabilities are available to the regulators, and that BSP “checked in” on Coins.ph after the collapse of FTX to verify that there was no exposure.

“We are fully regulated by the regulators,” he says. “We have quarterly audits.”

He adds that the exchange is expected to segregate customers’ assets from the company’s own proprietary assets.

Progress since April