Major Japanese financial services company, SBI Holdings announced today that it has launched a new crypto lending service to allow users to earn an annual interest rate of 1%. At the start, the lending service only supports bitcoin, but the company plans to expand services to include Ethereum and XRP.

Dubbed ‘VC Trade Lending’, the new service allow users to enter the program with as low as 0.1 BTC. Further, the company mentioned that the upper limit is currently capped at 5 BTC. Recently, SBI bought a Japanese cryptocurrency exchange Tao Tao to expand its crypto portfolio.

SBI added that the company will not charge any deposit fee, account management fee, or annual membership fee. However, a small fee will be charged on withdrawals in Japanese Yen.

“VC Trade Lending is a service that allows customers to rent out their crypto assets to the Company and receive usage fees according to the quantity and duration of the crypto assets. All of our customers’ lending destinations for crypto-asset services are highly reliable SBI Group companies, so you can use them with peace of mind. The SBI Group’s know-how and extensive track record will create appropriate products in accordance with the market and provide more trading opportunities,” the official announcement states.

Crypto Expansion

In recent months, SBI Holdings has intensified acquisitions and offerings related to cryptocurrencies. SBI’s Crypto-focused venture capital arm, SBI VC Trade reported strong financial results in 2019. SBI has strong business relations with Ripple as the company recently announced investments in MoneyTap, a venture jointly developed by Ripple and SBI. In October this year, Yoshitaka Kitao, CEO of SBI, said that Ripple will most likely relocate to Japan should it choose to leave the United States.

Finance Magnates earlier reported about the launch of the first Security Token Offering (STO) by SBI Holdings. SBI allocated shares of its esports games arm, SBI e-Sports, and acted as an underwriter for the issuance.