Blockchain Japan Weekly — 11.09.2018
A weekly review of the crypto landscape in Japan, focusing on regulations and investor/public opinions on blockchain and cryptocurrency
Summary
- Tightened regulations on the registration of crypto exchanges
- Rakuten deal to buy Everybody’s Bitcoin
- Tsukuba city trial of blockchain voting system
- An institutional trader at Deutsche Bank joins crypto exchange startup
- LINE messaging app launches its own cryptocurrency: LINK
Introduction
Despite recent waves of a crackdown on cryptocurrency by numerous governments and regulators, certain countries demonstrate promising future for a decentralised or partially decentralised market economy. Japan is one of them, a country that legalised cryptocurrency last year and made numerous efforts to regulate its surrounding economy.
The primary player in the regulation of cryptocurrency in Japan is the Financial Services Agency (FSA). In a news published by The Japan Times on the 2nd of September, the FSA stated that it will make the process of obtaining a legal license for cryptocurrency exchanges more strict. This would make smaller exchanges have a bigger burden to obtain the legal means of operating the revenue-generating part of their business. It might also have led to the acquisition of Everybody’s Bitcoin by the Japanese retail giant Rakuten in a deal of over $2.4 million. Rakuten stated that one of the benefits for the acquired party is the support to obtain the exchange license under more strict regulations.
The Rakuten acquisition deal with Everybody’s Bitcoin also demonstrates an important fact within the Japanese cryptocurrency and foreign exchange market. One of the main reasons for Rakuten to go through with this deal is that numerous clients in their foreign exchange securities subsidiary demanded the implementation of trading and exchange facilities for cryptocurrencies. This means that there is an increase in demand coming from forex investors within Japan.
Not only are investors more interested in dealing with cryptocurrencies in Japan, even local government bodies such as Tsukuba City are now experimenting with blockchain-based voting systems. In their recent vote on which social programs the city should support, the voters were required to use a system that used blockchain to ensure security and authenticity.
Another group of cryptocurrency enthusiasts is the community of established bankers. Yasuo Matsuda, a veteran institutional trader at Deutsche Bank, recently announced that he will join the crypto exchange startup FXcoin Ltd, following the footsteps of the company’s founder, Tomoo Onishi, who was also an established employee at Deutsche Bank. This has been a recent trend among employees from institutional banking taking their chances at crypto startups.
Lastly, we also need to mention the newly released cryptocurrency of the messaging app LINE. The name for that cryptocurrency is not surprisingly LINK. There was no traditional ICO structure to raise initial funds, but rather, it was distributed via an airdrop, which is an incentive structure whereby participants get newly released coins as a reward for performing certain tasks such as liking their Facebook Page, commenting on their subreddit account or using one of their services.
If you wish to try out some airdrops, you can use online services such as Airdrop Tracker to start getting free newly released cryptocurrencies: certainly a more productive way of killing your spare time.
Ok, that’s the news aggregate and interpretation of last week’s crypto market development in Japan. Hope you enjoyed the read and see you next week!
