Gold-i’s Head of APAC visited Singapore to attend a couple of industry events and see clients. We have asked her to reflect on the events with a few questions:

1. Have you noticed a change in industry focus from previous events?

The Blockchain Festival and the Trader’s Fair happening on the same date, door to door, we can see that there is a correlation between the two spaces which hasn’t quite been merged yet.

For example, traditional Brokers have been adding Crypto CFD products into their offering package over the past few years. Blockchain natives are bringing experts from traditional financial space to transfer real-world assets (RWA) to security token offerings (STO), allowing more intangible assets available for trading. There’s a trend of FX and crypto merging space which will become more defined in the coming year.

2. How has Singapore become an industry hub?

There are many reasons why Singapore is such an essential hub for the industry. 

• Starting with location, Singapore is the centre of SEA. This makes it easy to travel, merging markets in neighbouring countries.
• Highly diverse cultural background also plays a crucial part. Both English and Chinese are the official languages, most people living in a bilingual environment, so it is easy for local people to embrace foreign business models, as well as allowing local businesses to go international.
• A solid economic base and stable political environment support Singapore’s success, which attracts hot money as investments, as well as talents for relocation.
• Singapore offers an encouraging environment for new entrepreneurship, seeing lots of new startups in the industry as well as in-person meetups, shows and expos happening daily.
• Local policy highly supports the Blockchain industry, which attracted quite a few big Crypto Exchanges HQ in Singapore, therefore attracting affiliated resources to pour in the same region.

3. What was your key takeaway from the event?

For the FX world, traders are mostly focusing on trading techniques. The FX Brokerage business market is mature already, from the ups and downs of the past few years, the model of operations and technology providers.

For brokers, the biggest challenge would be either how to find a new territory/market where people know nothing about trading to win the market share, or focusing on how to keep the high net worth clients. From my learnings at the Trader’s Fair, Brokers are allocating a lot of their time magnifying their strengths to try to turn that into traders’ brand loyalty, especially for the retail space where the cost of replacement is fairly low.

However it is exactly a different story in Blockchain territory, everything is relatively new, high potential high risks. So far the keywords are still “security”, “zero knowledge”, “custody” and ”double account verification”.

Lots of opportunities come along with huge uncertainties. The original idea of decentralisation comes from the lack of trust in the centralised institutions, namely banks or governments. However with the regulators interfering with the current market, either banning the whole operations from specific regions or giving penalised big figured fines, things get a bit unclear where the technology is heading to.