Online Giant Buys Crypto Exchange

Ruzaan du Plooy
Sep 5, 2018 · 2 min read

If you don’t already know who Rakuten is, they are a massive electronic commerce and internet company. Rakuten was founded in Tokyo in 1997 by a man named Hiroshi Mikitani. This company is the largest e-commerce site in Japan and is one of the worlds top e-commerce sites regarding sales.

Last week Rakuten made headlines when the large company released their plans on aquiring a Tokoyo-based cryptocurrency exchange called Everybody’s Bitcoin. Everbody’s Bitcoin has been in the works since late 2016 and was officially launched last year. According to reports from the FSA, the exchange remains unlicensed and unregulated.

The date of the sale is scheduled for October 1, while the sale price for the 2 year old exchange is sitting at 265 million yen, which is $3,027,200.00 CAD to put it into perspective. Rakuten is a diversified company offering not only e-commerce solutions but services regarding travel, digital information, communication, and technology services. The most important sector pertaining to the exchange acquisition is most likely their financial technology sector that offer services like credit cards, insurance banking, and securities.

This conjuction started because of Rakutens Blockchain lab in 2016 who was researching Bitcoin and related tech. Realising the importance and predicting the growth regarding cryptocurrency they decided to proactively work towards providing solutions for cryptocurrency online payments, offline retail stores, and digital payments.

The company quoted:

“In order to provide cryptocurrency payment methods smoothly, we believe it is necessary for us to provide a cryptocurrency exchange function, and have been considering entry into the cryptocurrency exchange industry as the Rakuten Group.”

Acquisition to Support Diversified Services

The company has been accepting bitcoin payments since it integrated its U.S. online portal with Bitnet for about 3 years. Rakuten also introduced their own loyalty-based Coin in February, according to CoinDesk.

The purchase of the exchange is expected to stretch Rakuten’s service offering. Japans Bitcoin platform will benefit from Rakuten’s assistance in enhancing its infrastructure to improve its security, promote cryptocurrency business prospects and meet regulator’s requirements for obtaining a license.

BitvoExchange

Bitvo is a Canadian state-of-the-art cryptocurrency exchange and trading platform making cryptocurrency easier to access and more secure for its customers.

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