Coins.ph seeks to double user base in 2024, eyes more areas for int’l expansion

Digital asset provider Coins.ph on Thursday said it targets to double its user base in 2024, as the firm seeks to expand overseas and widen its global footprint to cover five continents this year.

According to Coins.ph chief executive officer Wei Zhou, the company currently has 18 million registered users, but only around 1 million of these are active on a monthly basis — two metrics he said the firm is seeking to double by 2024.

“In terms of total number of users, we hopefully can double that. I think that’s possible,” he told reporters during a briefing in Taguig City.

Zhou said the firm saw a number of its users exit the platform in the past year, which he described as a “challenging year” for cryptocurrencies, as he said they no chose not to invest in the market.

“I think for us, we’re gonna have a major campaign to recall those users back. The app itself wasn’t perfect in the last couple of years and I think as we made it better, we hope that, you know, a lot of our work will basically to recall lost users,” he said.

Zhou said among the initiatives the firm is taking is to integrate Solana blockchain — the third-largest behind Bitcoin and Ethereum — into its platform by February.

“We should be able to bring a lot more benefits to our users. These include airdrops, these include giveaways, and basically, hopefully, we can bring some really cool games and NFTs (non-fungible tokens) into our system as well,” he said.

Coins is also banking on its global expansion to onboard more users, as it acquired licenses in Europe, Latin America, Australia and Africa.

“I’m proud to say that with partnerships and directly have licenses by Coins, I think we should be able to land in all five continents in 2024,” Zhou said.

“With some of our innovations that we’re building here, we wanna take Coins.ph global and be one of the first Filipino companies that have a good. real global footprint, serving not just Filipinos but other people in parts of the world,” he added.

Coins said it is also looking at expanding into the Middle East, banking on the 2 million overseas Filipino workers and some $10 billion in remittance inflows from the area.

Aside from its expansion, Zhou said Coins could also see more users as its competitor Binance is facing issues with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) which said it would ask the National Telecommunication Commission (NTC) and the Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT) to block access to Binance because it was not authorized to sell or offer securities.

“I think we will have more opportunities, we will be able to onboard users to our platform, but I think it also creates challenges. Less so, I think, for the new users, moreso for the existing users that have been trading on the offshore exchanges. Just the fact that they’re offshore means they have more product offerings,” he said.

“What we can do internally is actually to ramp up our own product offerings and then in terms of supporting more tokens, supporting more blockchains, I think that’s step one,” he added.—RF, GMA Integrated News