Japanese Giant Rakuten is Stepping into Crypto Space

Rakuten Ichiba Inc. is the largest e-commerce site in Japan and among the world’s largest by sales. The company operates Japan’s biggest Internet bank and third-largest credit card company (by transaction value). The e-commerce giant could not skip the fact that crypto and blockchain are getting worldwide popularity and could not resist from the impact of it. Rakuten just bought the Japanese cryptocurrency exchange ‘Everybody’s Bitcoin’.

In recent news, an official Rakuten announcement said, its subsidiary Rakuten Card acquired 100% of the Tokyo-based exchange. The deal is worth JPY 265 million (around $2.4 million).

Rakuten, in a press conference, added

“Rakuten Group decided to acquire Everybody’s Bitcoin shares so that it can realize the early registration as a cryptocurrency exchange and develop cryptocurrency services to customers by combining the know-how of Everybody’s Bitcoin as a cryptocurrency exchange, and the know-how of Rakuten Group as a provider of various financial services,”

Also, Rakuten has had their fair amount of interest in the growing technology, having established Rakuten Blockchain Lab in 2016, they have been researching on the technology ever since.

Rakuten further continued,

“We expect that the role of cryptocurrency-based payments in e-commerce, offline retail and in P2P payments will grow in the future,” the company said. “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.”

Rakuten is a public-traded Japanese concoction with various activities. Its main interests lie in online retail, fintech, financial services, digital content, and communications.

“Everybody’s Bitcoin” established last year, was added to Japan’s Financial Services Agency (FSA) for a cryptocurrency trading registration. Since then, the exchange has been operating as a deemed cryptocurrency exchange with pending approval of the official registration.

According to Rakuten, the decision was made in the interest of the ever-growing world of crypto trading, which is adding up to 50k users on daily basis worldwide, mainly among the clients of its online securities and forex trading platform Rakuten Securities, which is one of the largest by trading volume in Japan. Rakuten has an optimistic approach and is looking forward to putting its faith in the crypto world.