The Japan-based chat app operator Line will offer customers handouts of its cryptoasset as a bonus when they make fiat payments using its e-pay platform.
The new promotional drive comes six months after a Line and Yahoo Japan merger under the Z Holdings umbrella. The Z Holdings merger, first mooted in late 2019, saw the Line founder Naver, a South Korean internet giant, and SoftBank, the Yahoo Japan majority owner, join forces to create a new East Asian internet, fintech and crypto powerhouse.
The new agency has already announced plans to merge the existing Line Pay platform with the Yahoo Japan-run PayPay, an e-pay platform with some 80m users.
The Line payment platform currently links to the Line chat app within the latter’s interface. And the identical app also has a tab that directs its users to the Line crypto exchange: the Line Bitmax Wallet.
Because the agency appears to be like to combine its two e-pay solutions, it has announced that clients who use their Line Pay accounts to pay at one of over 3.8m Pay partner stores nationwide will obtain around USD 1 value of Line’s link (LN) token as a reward.
Per All About, the funds shall be handed out on a first-come-first-served basis, with around USD 912,000 worth of tokens up for grabs until September 30.
The link token got a boost earlier this month when it was listed on South Korea’s Bithumb exchange.
Earlier this year, the e-commerce heavyweight Rakuten, one of Z Holdings’ biggest rivals within the fast-growing Japanese crypto space, announced that it might permit clients to transform loyalty factors to bitcoin (BTC). Rakuten has additionally created a platform that enables its clients to prime up their Rakuten e-pay accounts using bitcoin and ethereum (ETH).
SoftBank raised eyebrows within the sector when it offered its controlling stake within the home crypto exchange TaoTao to another rival, the SBI Group – apparently with a view to focusing on the success of the Line Bitmax Wallet trading platform.
But SoftBank has additionally backed numerous crypto projects this year, with a spate of investments in spring earlier than a USD 200m funding in the Latin American exchange giant Mercado Bitcoin in July.
Naver, meanwhile, has been talked about as a doable buyer of Bithumb. The exchange’s majority proprietor has been seeking to exit the crypto space, but the path seems to have gone cold with potential buyers unsure about the asking worth and regulatory issues.
