It's not so much a comparison to FIAT or to BTC. It's more like a recognition of the fact that most cryptos are denominated in BTC, like e.g. the US stock market is denominated in USD, and e.g. Japan's stock market - I'm taking a wild guess here - probably isn't denominated in USD.
Japanese cryptocurrency exchange bitFlyer announced today it’s expanding to the U.S., with approval to operate in 42 states starting today. This includes regulatory approval in New York via the state’s Department of Financial Services’ “BitLicense”, which only five other cryptocurrency companies currently have.
For comparison,
Coinbase has approval to operate in 48 states (including Washington, D.C.) and Gemini is operating in 46 states (including Washington, D.C.).
The exchange is by far the biggest in Japan, trading about $180 million worth of bitcoin per day. In terms of traditional exchange volume this ranks as the 14th largest exchange worldwide, but when you add margin volume to the calculation the exchange is actually the largest in the world in terms of total exchange volume.
Founded in 2014, bitFlyer has raised a total of $36 million in venture funding.
At launch
bitFlyer’s U.S. exchange will only support bitcoin/USD pairs, but “plans to expand its cryptocurrencies to include altcoins such as Litecoin, Ethereum, Ethereum Classic,
Bitcoin Cash and more.”
https://techcrunch.com/2017/11/28/japanese-bitcoin-exchange-bitflyer-is-coming-to-the-u-s/The largest Japanese Crypto Exchange now supports USD and plans to support Bitcoin Cash... Maybe the crypto market is changing and BTC is not the underling value of crypto coins... There is so many new changes being done in this New Year...
It would be awesome if there were an exchange for ION/USD available to the Ionomy community