Rakuten, Japanese e-commerce giants in advance talks to launch a cryptocurrency.
During this week’s Mobile World Congress event in Barcelona, Rakuten CEO Hiroshi Mikitani revealed the “Rakuten Coin” initiative – he also stated that this coin will be used to attract more customers as part of the company’s points-based loyalty rewards program. Mikitani presented the project as a way to help the company in expanding its international customer base when he spoke at the event on Tuesday.
However, according to a report from Bitnet, it cannot be said by certainty that when the coin shall be launched. But the company looked really keen on launching the coin in the coming months this was clearly evident when the firm stated their intentions to eventually make Rakuten Coin available for use within all of its businesses, which along with its global marketplace includes a travel company, an on-demand video service and mobile messaging service Viber, to name a few among many others.
The also further revealed their desire to expand on a global scale, by positioning the Rakuten Coin as a ‘borderless’ payment method that would gradually tranquilize the exchange fee rate they believe this can be used as bait to lure in more international customers The company has already revealed their vision by saying that it already sees international demand on this platform.
Rakuten – who has often been compared to Amazon -are no strangers to the cryptocurrency world they have relatively been associated with cryptocurrencies for quite some time now, precisely going way back in 2015 when they decide to accept payments in bitcoin using the payment processor Bitnet. After quite a while Rakuten eventually invested in Bitnet with the help of two of Bitnet’s former employees for creating a Belfast-based blockchain lab following an acqui-hire in 2016
Using the fame of a Rakuten-branded cryptocurrency, the e-commerce company intends on using that work and applying it to its global customer base.
The vision behind this move is to create a buzz globally as the use cryptocurrencies seem to be spreading worldwide. Crunchbase also reported that The officials at Rakuten believe that this shall help them to attract new customers to their loyalty program, which has already gifted reward points worth more than $9 billion since it first debuted in 2003.