Line, which has around 200m monthly active users, joins Telegram and a series of other global social apps making a foray into the crypto market. Asia has emerged as the hub for the boom in cryptocurrencies but recent exchange attacks have led regulators around the world to take aim at the trading of bitcoin and other digital currencies.
Line’s exchange, called Bitbox, will offer more than 30 cryptocurrencies including bitcoin, ethereum and litecoin at a trading fee of 0.1 per cent.
“With cryptocurrency, we are going to take our challenge in financial services global,” Takeshi Idezawa, the chief executive of Line, said at a conference on Thursday.
In late January, the company said it had applied to Japan’s Financial Services Agency to obtain a licence to operate a virtual currency exchange. But the process was held up after the hacking of $530m in investors’ funds from Japan’s cryptocurrency exchange Coincheck that same month.
The incident was the largest hack of its kind so far and has called into question the safety of exchanges that hold hundreds of millions of dollars worth of digital assets.
Line is also applying to operate in the US, but it chose to first launch Bitbox in Singapore where the regulatory environment was friendlier, according to a person close to the company.
The Japanese company, which is owned by Naver, South Korea’s biggest internet portal operator, is far from the only social app to venture into the crypto market.
Telegram, the encrypted messaging app, recently raised $1.7bn through the sale of its own cryptocurrency, while Kik, an ad-free messaging app, also launched its own digital token. Most recently in May, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg appointed one of his most senior lieutenants to head a team to experiment with blockchain, the decentralised digital ledger technology.
Source: FT.com
