This year iFXexpo took place in Cyprus in Limassol. iFXexpo has been running for 7 years. During its existence, the exhibition was visited by more than 35,000 participants and 1,500 service providers from all over the world. This year the event was visited by more than 4,000 participants, cutting records of past years.

Among the hottest topics were payment processing problems, leverage restrictions and a decline in trading volume on traditional financial markets, which leads to a decrease in brokers and infrastructure companies. The main issue for brokers is now to expand the number of asset classes they offer.

It looks like cryptocurrency this year received less attention on iFXepro than in the previous 2 years. But rather, this topic simply ceased to be the center of attention and spread evenly throughout all parts of the exhibition. Most often and with special interest at the event, they talked about payment instruments, asset tokenization and derivative financial instruments linked to cryptocurrencies.

Crypto processing is becoming increasingly popular

Increasingly strict rules are applied to Forex brokers by regulators of most countries. The requirements of banks are also tightening. Even financial institutions from Eastern Europe, Asia and some offshore jurisdictions traditionally loyal to brokers and high-risk companies gradually bring their procedures to high standards adopted in the USA and Western Europe. And therefore it becomes more difficult to accept payments in a convenient for clients way.

In this regard, the interest of market participants to crypto payments and crypto processing is growing rapidly. It is not a secret that Zerohub provides crypto payment processing services. Our iFXexpo team has been closely studying the demand for such kind of services.

Most in demand at the present time models are Fiat-Crypto-Fiat and simply Crypto-Fiat. In the first case, the main goal of the client is to bring the payment acceptance process to the unregulated area, while maintaining maximum convenience for its users.

Acceptance of payments in cryptocurrencies with instant conversion into Fiat and crediting to a bank account is demanded primarily by e-commerce companies and online service providers. Their goal is to provide new opportunities for their customers. The volume of payments for goods and services in cryptocurrencies does not grow as fast as predicted. But the ability to pay in crypto becomes a good form in e-commerce, and in some areas, such as hosting providers, almost the industry standard.

We have interviewed 29 companies. 21 of them are waiting for their traditional payment providers to provide crypto processing. They don’t expect new players to provide such services. This generates demand for crypto processing from classical payment systems.

There is also a demand in the crypto-to-crypto payment acceptance segment. First of all, it comes from high-risk companies like gambling. But the offer in this segment is much bigger than the rest since providers do not have to deal with banks and regulators. The offer of such services is a purely technical matter. And there were a lot of technical solutions for crypto-to-crypto processing at iFXexpo this year.

Demand for crypto trading platforms evolves a lot

In previous years, banks and brokers have been actively experimenting with crypto trading by offering it to their customers. This formed the demand for white label solutions of cryptocurrency exchanges and crypto liquidity for standard trading platforms.

However, this year we are seeing an increase in interest in more complex and flexible solutions. The possibilities of the white label are far from being satisfactory to everyone. Big players want to have their own exchange infrastructure, which they can adapt to different business scenarios. Including tokenization of assets, work with indices and various derivatives.

Fintech flexibility is often fraught with security vulnerabilities. First of all, interest is caused by products that already at the level of architecture set high safety standards and the ability to adapt to different business scenarios. Our ZeroCore is built on a micro-service architecture and fully meets these requirements. But we could not find analogs at the exhibition. Let’s go to search from Money 20/20.

In general, iFXexpo passed as expected dynamically. The mood of the participants is on the rise. The industry is focused on rapid growth in the coming year. Drivers for growth are visible in almost every segment. Let’s see what this summer will bring.