The Japan Virtual Currency Exchange Association (JVCEA), the self-governing organization for the cryptocurrency industry in Japan, announced the amount of spot trading and number of cryptocurrency accounts as of November 8, 2019 tallied from the totals of association members in the month of September.

The total was aggregated using the status of transactions by cryptocurrency companies who serve as association members. The data submitted by the companies in reports was used as a base to create the document. This total has been made public every month starting from December 2018.

In the newly release document, deposit balances for users of cryptocurrency exchanges in Japan for September 2019 totaled 363 billion JPY(approximately 3.33 billion USD). Of this amount, cryptocurrency accounted for the equivalent of approximately 277.4 billion JPY (2.55 billion USD), and legal tender accounted for approximately 8.56 billion JPY (790 million USD). These figures declined when compared to the previous month (August 2019), which had a total of 379.2 billion JPY (3.48 billion USD) in account deposit balances. However, this is seen to be influenced by a drop in market price for some cryptocurrencies in the period between August and September, and the number and amount of deposits in September actually increased around 4.9% compared to August.

When comparing the amount and number of spot transactions and margin trading against the previous month, September saw a significant increase, with an additional 27.6%, in spot transactions, with margin trading growing almost 2.4 times. There were also around 3.07 million user accounts　in September, with 1.94 million of those accounts, or 63% determined as active. In August, there were 3.04 million user accounts, with 1.92 million active. Although the number of active accounts did not experience any markable change, the number of accounts grew.

Furthermore, the ranking for the most spot trading volume for cryptocurrency had Bitcoin (BTC) in first place with an equivalent of approximately 354.5 billion JPY, Ripple (XRP) in second with 46.7 billion JPY, Monacoin (MONA) in third with approximately 15 billion JPY, and Ethereum (ETH) in fourth with 8.9 billion JPY. Monacoin, a cryptocurrency issued from Japan, was in 5th place in August and experienced a notable jump to third most traded.

The JVCEA was established on April 23, 2018 with the purpose of becoming a unified self-regulating body for cryptocurrency exchange operators, and was fully certified as a self-regulating organization for cryptocurrency by the Japanese government’s Financial Services Agency in October 2018. The chairman of the JVCEA is Taizen Okuyama, president of the major listed Japanese FX/foreign currency firm MONEY PARTNERS GROUP, Co., Ltd. Other cryptocurrency exchange members include Monex Group’s cryptocurrency exchange subsidiary Coincheck, SBI Holdings, Inc.’s SBI VC Trade Co., Ltd., GMO Financial Holdings, Inc.’s GMO Coin, and the Fisco Cryptocurrency Exchange, which took over Tech Bureau’s Zaif exchange. There are a total of 27 companies related to cryptocurrency operations in the association, those run by listed companies.

*This article was written by FISCO.