
Criptoloja and Mind The Coin is a pair of trading platforms for brokering the purchase and sale of cryptocurrencies. These are the first cryptocurrency exchanges to be licensed in a country in the very west of the Iberian Peninsula.
The Portuguese central bank, the Banco de Portugal, has announced that it is licensing the Criptoloja and Mind The Coin platforms for brokering cryptocurrencies. The Banco de Portugal is the only authority in the country that can take such a step. This is based on a law that came into force in Portugal this April.
Both platforms received permission after almost nine months. Criptoloja applied for a license at the end of September last year. “It’s been a long journey, but being the first licensed cryptocurrency exchange in Portugal means a lot to us,” Pedro Borges, CEO of the Criptoloja platform, told Coindesk.com.
It is likely that additional licenses for cryptocurrency exchanges will increase in Portugal. The Banco de Portugal stated that it had five other formally submitted applications on the table and that at the same time there had been about 60 informal contacts with potential applicants for virtual currency trading licenses.