Line already began Link trading on its international BitBox cryptocurrency exchange in mid-October 2018. Due to stricter national cryptocurrency regulations in Japan, LVC had to wait to obtain a license from local financial regulators in September 2019 before launching its BitMax cryptocurrency exchange in the country.
LVC Corporation, the crypto subsidiary of messaging giant Line, will launch trading of its proprietary cryptocurrency Link in Japan in April.
According to a press release on Jan. 30, LVC is also developing a system meant for Link’s debut in Japan on its local cryptocurrency exchange BitMax.
According to its official website, Link allows its holders to access a wide range of services and decentralized applications, or DApps.
Social messengers and cryptocurrencies
Line is not the only social application that is currently attempting to establish its own crypto economy. Other examples are messaging apps Kik, Telegram, Whatsapp and social media giant Facebook.
Both Kik and Telegram are currently struggling in legal battles with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission over the alleged sale of unregistered securities to U.S. citizens. Kik recently requested the formal definition of a trial date for its lawsuit with the SEC. The SEC also recently fortified its case against Telegram and suggested that its Gram tokens are worth less than donuts given their lack of intrinsic value.
Facebook’s Libra stablecoin has also faced pushback from regulators. However, even if it were never to see the light of day, the very idea of Facebook attempting to launch a global alternative to traditional currencies has started a wider discussion about digital currencies globally.
As Cointelegraph reported in late January, major global economists credit Facebook’s Libra with pushing the world to start reconsidering the United States dollar as the anchor currency.
Twitter Adds Bitcoin Emoji, Jack Dorsey Suggests Unicode Does the Same
Twitter co-founder and CEO Jack Dorsey tweeted the newly added Bitcoin emoji on Feb. 2 and tagged Unicode, the consortium managing the character standard, in an apparent suggestion to do the same.
Dorsey’s tweet showed that, now, whenever a Twitter user writes the Bitcoin or BTC hashtag, an image showing its symbol appears next to it.
Dorsey’s apparent suggestion that the symbol be included in the Unicode text encoding standard was appreciated by the community, with Lightning Labs co-founder Elizabeth Stark joining the request.
After Twitter added the emoji to its platform, many cryptocurrency personalities test-tweeted it, including Tron (TRX) founder and Bittorrent CEO Justin Sun.
The official accounts of major cryptocurrency exchange Binance used the emoji and suggested that the cryptocurrency community should join in using the hashtag to get it trending on Twitter. Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao also retweeted the message stating, “Let’s do this.”
Jack Dorsey’s involvement with crypto
This is not the first foray into crypto by Twitter’s co-founder, who is also the CEO and founder of crypto-friendly mobile payments application Square. In early December 2019, he also announced that Twitter has a dedicated team to develop a decentralized standard for social media.
Square, on the other hand, was recently awarded a patent for a technology that purportedly cracks a present barrier in cryptocurrency merchant transactions by providing a real-time system that exchanges crypto for fiat money. In November, the firm also issued a letter to shareholders showing that Bitcoin buyers on the app doubled in Q3 2019, but brought low profits.
