Today Thailand’s SCBX, the holding company for the Siam Commercial Bank (SCB), announced it terminated its deal to acquire a 51% stake in cryptocurrency exchange Bitkub for Thai Baht 17,850 million ($499m). The reason given is Thailand’s regulator, the Securities and Exchange Commission, has requested Bitkub to address some regulatory issues, and it’s unclear how long this will take. According to SCB Securities (SCBS), the acquirer, the deal cancellation was mutually agreed upon.
SCBS says it has spent several months on due diligence, which didn’t raise any red flags. On the contrary, it says it could see many opportunities for cooperation.
SCBX and SCBS said they remain committed to blockchain technology and digital assets.
A month before the bank unveiled the Bitkub deal, SCB announced a major restructuring creating the new holding company SCBX. At the time, CEO and Chairman Arthid Nanthawithaya said, “It is crucial to quickly enter this new arena of competition in order to survive in the next 3-5 years.”
Perhaps it was a coincidence, but between August 22 and today, Bitkub clients were unable to withdraw monies to SCB, with the service reinstated today. The outage was attributed to planned maintenance.
It’s not the first deal that’s been abandoned since the crypto crash. Ten days ago, Galaxy Digital dropped its deal to acquire digital asset custody firm BitGo. In that case, the termination was not by mutual agreement.
