Four months after launching over-the-counter (OTC) trading, and fueled with US$1.6 million in funding from bitcoin mining giant, Bitmain, BitKan is looking to kick off its expansion plans starting with the U.S. "The U.S. is a large and special market target, so we are doing a lot of preparations focusing on law and localization in these three months," BitKan CEO Liu Yang told Bitcoin Magazine . "We plan to start all-sided layout in America in September." Shenzhen-based BitKan offers Bitcoin-related tools and services such as aggregated news, mining monitoring and price alerts. In April, it raised US$1.6 million in a Series A funding round from Bitmain, one of the world’s largest manufacturers of bitcoin mining hardware. OTC trading was introduced in May as a solution for peer-to-peer trading. According to Ruby Chan, BitKan’s marketing director, the app has grown in popularity, especially over the past two years. The company now serves some "millions of users in total and over one hundred thousand registered users." In July, the company triggered its global expansion plans, starting with releasing OTC trading functions for overseas markets on its mobile apps. When asked which markets have seen the most notable growth, Yang said that it is still too early to tell, although "we could foresee that Russia is really a large market." BitKan is now working toward developing its current businesses, including OTC trading and polishing its apps "to offer the perfect service to our users," Yang said. The company plans to launch a brand new, re-designed website. Next week, it will kick off its BitKan OTC Referral Program which will allow registered users to earn bitcoins by referring friends to the trading service. The next steps for BitKan will include promoting its products in international markets and "[trying] to find the right shoe […]
