Link, the cryptocurrency faces scrutiny by the Financial Services Agency (FSA) of Japan by notice of “business improvement orders.”

LINK, will not be available for users in Japan as the Bitbox exchange is not licensed by the Financial Services Agency as an exchange platform yet. 

Line, the social messaging app giant in Japan will be issuing 1 million tokens in total.  Of the total 1 million tokens, a reserve of about 200 billion will be retained for the company reserve.  The remaining 800 million will be issued to the public users, where they can use the link tokens to pay for the LINE services.

LINE Tech Plus PTE, a subsidiary that will be based in Singapore will be issuing the LINK cryptocurrency.  The company plans to release two dapps in the month of September and they will be tentatively releasing over 10 decentralized apps during the first financial quarter of 2019.

There are no Initial Coin Offerings for Link.  There will be reward systems where the users will be compensated with LINK when they use the services that are available within the LINE ecosystem.

Takeshi Idezawa, the CEO of Line stated, “The incentive system has been designed to spread adoption of the cryptocurrency and also the range of services and apps that support it,”

The LINE Users; however, will be able to trade Link via BITBOX exchange with other crypto currencies as of September.   It is for the FSA scrutiny to decide on when the Japan will be able to use Link for regular payments.

Of note, the shares of the Japanese App Giant LINE trades on the Tokyo Stock Exchange and the NYSE.  Link Chain is the proprietary blockchain network of the giant and LINK is its own cryptocurrency.  The giant has a built in customer base, which is not easy for any digital currency startup to dream about.

There are more than 200 million users the company earned via its LINE ecosystem.  And, this is without even conducting an Initial Coin Offering. However, the FSA poses a check point on the company in terms of the licensing requirements.  The FSA will prevent the LINE customers from being able to use its new currency Link in US and Japan.

The natural benefits inherent with the company cannot be beneficially put to use with the launch of its cryptocurrency because more than 75 million LINE users are based from Japan.  Therefore, it can be difficult to extract the complete benefits of launching the currency despite holding a huge inbuilt customer base.

Bitbox is the cryptocurrency exchange of LINE.  This exchange however, will be able to favor only crypto-to-crypto trading.

Though the FSA has already approved more than 10 crypto exchanges, they are getting to be stricter about their regulatory standards after the disastrous hacks on one of their approved exchanges.  Consequently, the FSA have issued business improvement orders post the hack to several startup cryptocurrency startups.  Despite being a giant with established customer base, LINE faces challenges from the FSA in making things work for its crypto and users.