Rakuten Coin in the works

Rakuten has revealed its plans of launching their own digital coin called Rakuten Coin at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

One of the biggest e-commerce sites in the world, Rakuten intends to blockchenize its reward points system so as to make it more appealing to both domestic as well as international customers. According to latest statistics, some $9.1 billion worth of Super Points have been awarded by the program since it launched a decade ago.

Taking stage at the MWC, Hiroshi Mikitani, Rakuten’s CEO, described the planned coin as an attractive solution for cost conscious cross border purchases. Also the coin will appeal to young audience, investors and traders.

Rakuten didn’t provide much detail about Rakuten Coin and all the information that was provided was more of a general idea of what blockchain they would use or when they might launch as well as whether they have the green light to do so.

Rakuten, however, isn’t the only established company to consider new tokenized business models. Kik, and others, are working on potentially replacing advertising through tokens, while an established New Zealand company will tokenize their equity.

Rakuten’s decision to use blockchain technology to revamp its points system will definitely gain a competitive advantage because such tokens could act as semi-shares of sorts or non-voting shares, while also having the reward utility, which itself could be considered as earned dividends.

Making it all potentially a lot more interesting that those old paper coupons you get and forget somewhere in the next day until next time, if you are lucky to remember where you left them. Which all means others could follow suit, and perhaps very quickly, with Starbucks already considering accepting cryptocurrencies, while Amazon keeps hoarding some crypto domains for some reason.