[Interview] Can Local Exchanges Keep Up With Demand?

In response to recent user grievances voiced on social media regarding challenges faced by local exchanges, BitPinas has reached out to Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP)-licensed Virtual Asset Service Providers Coins.ph and Philippine Digital Asset Exchange (PDAX), and to GCrypto, the crypto trading feature of e-wallet giant GCash and is powered by PDAX. 

The exchange sent their responses to BitPinas on March 2024. 

The average Bitcoin price at that time was around ₱3.4 million to ₱3.9 million.

What’s the significance? This BitPinas initiative aims to provide clarity to the community, address any misconceptions, and rectify inaccuracies, thus ensuring a clearer understanding of the situation.

Question 1: Can Local Exchanges Keep Up With the Demand?

• Coins.ph expressed that its consistent system upgrade enables the platform to support the increase in market demand:

“We’ve significantly upgraded our Coins Pro matching engine to handle high trading volumes. Meanwhile, institutional traders can leverage advanced APIs that support up to 18,000 calls per minute with a latency of just 20ms.”

• PDAX stated that it is updating its systems, which may involve maintenance and upgrades to improve efficiency and support the increase in market demand:

“We are continually enhancing our systems to ensure that our platform is able to service the needs of our customers, especially as we anticipate increased demand in the coming months. Our team is working diligently to minimize the impact of such activities to our current users.”

• GCrypto showed its confidence that have partnered with those who they think are credible to support the increase in market demand: 

“The sudden surge in demand over the last month has surprised everyone in the industry, not just GCrypto, but we believe we have the right partners to support our customers properly during this period.”

What Are They Doing to Keep Up?

• Coins.ph shared with BitPinas the steps it is taking:
  • It has a new in-app face scanning that automates compliance, which enhances transaction verification speed and security while minimizing user friction. 
  • It streamlined risk controls to elevate standard deposit and withdrawal limits up to ₱10 million per day, ensuring uninterrupted trading. 
  • It enhanced its customer support and chatbot capabilities, ensuring round-the-clock service quality with faster resolution times and response rates. 
  • It minimized maintenance times to one hour or less in recent months.

“While occasional delays in deposits and withdrawals due to blockchain network congestion and partner outages may occur, these have not hindered our users from trading within Coins itself. We remain relentlessly committed to elevating Coins.ph to a world-class trading platform and will continue to deploy enhancements to empower our users.”

• PDAX told ‌BitPinas that it is prioritizing user convenience by offering various access points to its platform, including mobile apps, web interfaces, and multiple payment channels. 

“To minimize disruption to our users, we’ve always sought to provide multiple ways of accessing our platform through the app or through the web, via multiple payment channels, etc. Throughout, our customer success team is also on standby to assist our clients at any point.”

• GCrypto explained to BitPinas that it is doing what they can with its partner to help ensure the market makers can support the current volume experienced during the recent run.
  • They then assured that whenever there are coin launches or new listings, updates will be scheduled during off-peak trading hours.

“We also ensure we are monitoring closely the tickets raised by our customers and see if there is an abnormal increase in any concern and address the issues immediately and assist our customers as well.”

This article is published on BitPinas: [Interview] Can Local Exchanges Keep Up With Demand?

Advertisement

What else is happening in Crypto Philippines and beyond?