Interview: New Zealand Coinex Ripple Gateway coming

New Zealand Coinex Ripple Gateway to offer BTC (XBT), NZD, AUD, USD exchange services April 2nd

Caniluk Limited is an incorporated company in New Zealand that will soon be offering the first Ripple gateway in New Zealand.  Customers will be able to make deposits and withdrawals in Bitcoin, New Zealand Dollars, Australian Dollars, and US Dollars.  Thereby functioning as an effective Bitcoin exchange and complying with Anti-Money Laundering regulations that came into effect in New Zealand in 2009.

I got in contact with programmer and representative Sean Bennett from Caniluk Limited to find out more.

What prompted you to start CoinexNZ?

It was actually a Bitcoin thing: there are no regulated Bitcoin exchanges in New Zealand that we feel comply with the financial services laws introduced in New Zealand a couple years ago. We believe strongly in not making enemies with the authorities and regulators for the continued safety of not only our services, but the cryptocurrency front as a whole. There is one New Zealand exchange that is quite popular and some of us have used it ourselves, but we are worried it may become the subject of investigation in the future by the authorities and potentially tarnish the reputation of cryptocurrency (at least in NZ) if found to have broken any laws.

The service was originally to be a more ‘vanilla’ Bitcoin exchange, as when we were pondering the service first Ripple was still not open source and presented with some other concerns. However more recent developments have led us to believe that Ripple truly has so many advantages it cannot be ignored – and here we are, about to open a Ripple gateway that includes Bitcoin in around a week’s time.

Also, NZD is one of the major forex currencies and is currently missing from Ripple so we are keen to get some NZD into the market.

What do you hope to provide for New Zealand and Australian customers?

A closer, friendlier, gateway to ripple and access to cryptocurrencies. Can’t really get more simple than that.

Stability and safety are some buzzwords we try to keep in mind whilst designing our services. An example of this can be seen in our current bitcoin processing methods. While many exchanges are happy to go ahead and fully automate withdrawals/deposits we feel that the technology is still too young to be putting 100% trust into. Our processing will be triggered manually at set times of day, authorized by a human operator, allowing us to first simulate transactions and audit funds to make sure nothing has appeared/disappeared (*cough* Gox *cough*) for whatever reason.

Another of our major focuses is total compliance with local regulation regarding the financial services we are providing. We hope that this will instill some trust in our services, as well as help prevent things such as seizure of funds like as we saw in America with Mt. Gox (they are a great lesson to us all…) failing to register as a money transmitter.

Is Bitcoin popular in those countries?

While I cannot speak for Australia, here in NZ there is a great demand for Bitcoin and related services. We need more services to let people interact more with cryptocurrency, that much is clear. In the last few months we’ve seen Bitcoin popping up in more and more media (mainly due to Mt. Gox, whether that is fortunate or unfortunate I am undecided) and a few businesses have contacted us – despite never having advertised as providing crypto-related services before - to inquire about Bitcoin merchant support.

In addition to offering a Ripple exchange, do you have any future services in the works?

Yes, we have another service in the pipelines that will run alongside Coinex utilizing Coinex NZD / BTC (XBT). I’ll give you a hint: interest rates are important for this one.

 

What do you think about using the Ripple platform to establish BTC exchanges? Comments or questions? Leave them below!