Japan’s Line announces Bitbox, a new crypto exchange

The large Japanese messaging company Line has announced a new digital currency exchange called BitBox. The chief executive of this organization has listed three main cornerstones of the new platform - business, entertainment and media. Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Ethereum and Litecoin have already been confirmed as assets available for trading. Notably, fiat currencies will not be present.

According to CEO Takeshi Idezawa (in the title image), one of the most interesting features of the new platform will be a reward system and reiterated that the development is ongoing, although he didn’t mention any actual release dates. The exchange security will be provided by BitGo which already cooperates with Bitstamp, a large crypto exchange based in Luxembourg.

The idea of a chat platform with reward system and token economy partly resembles Telegram Open Network - even though the latter is also not released yet and it is too preliminary to fully compare the two. It is already clear that in case with Line, the chat app and the exchange app will be separate. One should expect even more systems like these in the future, when blockchain systems become even more optimized.

Despite the interest of mobile companies towards cryptocurrency payments, this is still not enough for the sphere. As witnessed in recent messages from MarketWatch, a commercially successful video game Fortnite has attracted more attention of analysts than the crypto market.

Image: Bloomberg