Cryptocurrency exchange Gemini intends to hire more than a hundred employees to expand its team in Singapore over the next year, it announced in a blog post on June 20. The company also stated that it plans to increasingly focus on the Asia-Pacific (APAC) market, which it believes will be crucial for its next growth stage.

Asia-Pacific Will Fuel ‘the Next Wave of Growth for Crypto,’ Gemini Says

Gemini, a US-based crypto exchange and custodian, announced on Tuesday it is planning to expand its headcount in Singapore to over 100 employees over the next year. The decision is meant to grow Gemini’s footprint in the city-state as it prepares to target the burgeoning APAC market aggressively.

“Our Singapore office will serve as a hub for our larger APAC operations. We believe that APAC will be a great driver of the next wave of growth for crypto and Gemini.”

– Gemini wrote in the blog post.

The move comes less than three years after Gemini added support for the Singapore dollar (SGD) to provide the state’s residents with direct access to crypto via their local currency. Gemini is ramping up efforts to fuel its APAC expansion, a market that “will be a great driver of the next wave of growth for crypto and Gemini,” the company stated.

In the meantime, Gemini is also actively working on opening an engineering center in Gurgaon, India, which is set to become its second-largest engineering hub behind the US.

More Exchanges Look Beyond the US Amid Growing Regulatory Pressures

Gemini’s intensified efforts to grow its presence abroad come amid an escalating regulatory crackdown on its home crypto market. Earlier this month, the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filed two successive lawsuits against Binance and Coinbase, the world’s biggest crypto exchanges by volume.

As a result, numerous crypto companies, particularly exchanges, are looking beyond the US, focusing on markets with clearer regulatory landscapes and significant potentials, such as Hong Kong, Singapore, and Europe. Like Gemini, Coinbase also expanded the services it provides in Singapore, one of the more crypto-friendly financial hubs.

Likewise, the now-bankrupt crypto exchange Bittrex also exited the US market in March, saying it was not “economically viable” to do business there due to mounting regulatory pressures. Last month, the company filed for bankruptcy protection, just three weeks after the SEC sued it for operating an unregistered securities exchange.

This article originally appeared on The Tokenist

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