Category: Japan

Japan Heavy into Cryptocurrency ???

3/13/2019

I have been listening to youtubers and seems Japan is using cryptocurrencies. Let me see how far down the rabbit hole this goes.............

Three Japanese Banks Launching Digital Currencies, Japan's Amazon Rakuten New Digital Strategy
https://www.jetro.go.jp/ext_images/canada/pdf/fintechseminaroct1817ueno.pdf

2.13.2019 MUFG and Akamai to Launch Blockchain Payment Network in 2020
MUFG is also developing a digital currency - MUFG Coin - as part of the project

2.17.2019 Japanese “Amazon” Rakuten May Soon Accept Cryptocurrency

1.22.2019 Japan moves toward a cashless society by RT America

1.22.2019 Japan's Next Big Thing - LINK Cryptocurrency By LINE by The Crypto Lark

5.1.2018 Top 5 Cryptocurrencies & Altcoins in Japan! by Altcoin Daily

1.23.2018 Japan a global leader in cryptocurrency investment
4.5.2018 14 Percent of Japan's Young Male Workforce Invest in Cryptocurrencies, Study Shows
4.10.2018 Japan Could Have More Than 3 Million Crypto Traders
1.4.2018 Japan: The New Heart of Bitcoin
Top 5 Cryptocurrencies in Japan

Bitcoin
Ripple
Ethereum
*****XEM(NEM) (Started 3/2015 - Fix Bitcoin Problems - Complete with Visa/Master Card - No Minors Harvesters - Inexpensive Transaction Fees)
MonaCoin (Tip coin - Fork of Litecoin)

9.1.2018 Top 5 Cryptocurrency Projects from Japan

MONACOIN (MONA)
QASH (QASH)
ALIS (ALIS)
NEM (XEM)
CARDANO (ADA)

Search Results: Top 5 Cryptocurrencies in Japan

The Japan Times on Cryptocurrencies

1.22.2019 Will people ditch cash for cryptocurrency? Japan is about to find out
Crypto for the Tokyo 2020 Olympics

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe says he wants 40% of payments to be cashless by 2025
government announced plans to offer tax breaks and subsidies for companies that get on board
some of the country’s biggest financial players think the way to wean Japan off cash lies in the technology that runs Bitcoin
Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group (MUFG), the country’s largest bank and the fifth largest in the world by total assets, has teamed with American internet company Akamai to build a blockchain-based consumer payment network in time for the Olympics
MUFG, which has also tested its own crypto-token
Mizuho Financial Group, a large holding company, has been experimenting with blockchain technology for several years as part of a project dubbed “J-Coin” and plans to release its own digital currency for retail payments in March
SBI Holdings, a big financial-services firm, says it’s building its own token, also for retail payments, called S Coin.
The wager all these companies are making is that Japan’s society is primed to start using digital cash
It is relatively technologically savvy, cryptocurrency trading has been uniquely popular in the country for years, and Japan’s financial regulators are more familiar with blockchain technology than any others in the world
government’s pressure to go cashless
Japan could leapfrog the technology underlying today’s electronic payment networks and go straight to blockchains
experiment works, the country’s economy might be remade
Everything from huge transactions between banks to small retail purchases could be carried out with barely any delay and at a fraction of the current cost
Japan will become the world’s biggest test bed for the decade-old idea that a cryptographic ledger and a network of computers can be used to create an electronic form of cash

The legacy of Mt. Gox

between 2010 and early 2014—Tokyo-based Mt. Gox was the global online platform for buying and trading Bitcoin
2013, it accounted for 70% of all Bitcoin transactions
hackers made off with $450 million worth of Bitcoin from the exchange, causing it to collapse, the shock waves were felt worldwide.
disaster was particularly traumatic for Japan, recalls Aya Miyaguchi, who at the time was working for Kraken, a US-based exchange that was one of the few competitors to Mt. Gox. “For the most part, people did not know anything about Bitcoin
worried Miyaguchi, a native of Japan who moved to the US 10 years ago and now heads the Ethereum Foundation
Miyaguchi met with Mineyuki Fukuda, an influential lawmaker in Japan’s ruling party who had been given the job of figuring out how to regulate the technology
In the late 1990s and early 2000s Japan’s tech industry, once the envy of the world, had lost big chunks of global market share to foreign companies, particularly in South Korea and China
Diginex, a Hong Kong–based consulting firm focused on blockchain technology.
Japan rolled out the world’s first (and still only) licensing regime for cryptocurrency exchanges, which went into effect in April 2017.
authorities were less forgiving after hackers looted half a billion dollars in January 2018 from Coincheck, an unlicensed exchange that was operating under an exemption
Japan’s Financial Services Agency (FSA) launched investigations of the nation’s cryptocurrency exchanges and ordered several of them to fix shoddy security practices. The regulators toughened up licensing, slowing new approvals to a halt; Coincheck, now under new management, finally got its license
After the Coincheck incident, the FSA “studied very hard about cryptocurrency and cybersecurity” and wound up better informed than most consultants in the industry, says Oki Matsumoto, chairman and managing director of Monex, Coincheck’s new owner.
Mt. Gox fiasco, the government turned the Coincheck hack into a teachable moment.

Inventing crypto-cash

blockchain-based cash can succeed in Japan: retail investors there already love crypto
affection apparently stems from their affinity for trading foreign currencies
Japanese traders account for more than half of all global margin trading in the foreign exchange market
they’ve expanded to cryptocurrency trading, taking advantage of Japan’s bustling (and now regulated) exchange scene
hard to pin down the Japanese cryptocurrency market’s exact size, but it has become Asia’s biggest market since China clamped down on trading in 2017
Analysts at Deutsche Bank say Japanese retail investors were a big reason why Bitcoin’s price shot up to almost $20,000 in late 2017
Prepaid card services like Suica, which are sold by the country’s major railway companies, are popular.
Andy Champagne, CTO of Akamai, is convinced that the pieces are in place for Japan to end its love affair with cash.
an extraordinarily technical society, and a society that’s very interested in transacting digitally
government’s push to go cashless fast, “it’s a unique opportunity at a unique time.”
Third-party services like exchanges can have big security problems, as the Mt. Gox and Coincheck hacks showed. And the most popular blockchains are slow and require masses of computing power to secure the ledger, which gives them huge carbon footprints.
The systems Japan’s banks are building could change that. MUFG’s blockchain will run on Akamai’s servers. The company is skilled at building proprietary algorithms to deliver web content to users around the world, its core business. That expertise readily translates to running a network that’s more energy efficient, faster, and cheaper to operate than a public blockchain, Champagne says. So much so, MUFG believes, that even payments too small to make sense on traditional credit card networks will be feasible.
Will people in Japan really ditch their cash for blockchains, though? Yoriko Beal, cofounder of HashHub, a co-working space for blockchain startups in Tokyo, is skeptical. The popularity of Suica cards shows that it’s not outside the realm of possibility. But she believes it’s about utility, not about the underlying technology. Suica cards are very useful, so people adopted them, she says: “If MUFG and Akamai are so sure that using blockchain can reduce costs a lot compared to, like, using metro cards, it might happen.”

HashHub
HashHub Articles on Medium
Blockchain Engineer Blog on Medium

Quote from article, "Criminals, drug dealers, and crooks aren’t the ones driving the price of bitcoin higher—it is Japanese men. At least that is the theory put forward by analysts at Deutsche Bank. They reckon Japanese traders in their 30s and 40s, who historically engaged in trading real currencies such as the yen and dollar, have turned their sights to cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin."

L@@K in the upper right hand corner of this screen shot and what do you see?

"Mitsubishi" and ??? are venturing in to cryptocurrencies together... who?

fintech is now in the mainstream. A huge industry in its own right, fintech is paving the way for mass scale disruption across the financial spectrum and may be the greatest threat to the status quo.
Leading companies such as Uber, Netflix, Skype and AirBnB have led the charge
Apple and Google, have begun their own skirmishes into financial territory
Huge innovations in payments, money transfer, wealth management, and mobile banking are just the beginning.
2014, MUFG recognized this growing trend and sought to capitalize on the swelling momentum by establishing an Innovation Center tasked with identifying uses and applications for leveraging new technology. In July 2015 it created a Digital Innovation Division, which has regularly hosted a start-up accelerator program ‘MUFG Digital Accelerator’ to facilitate entrepreneurial innovation and to develop new fintech products and services.
Visitors to Tokyo’s Narita Airport have already had a glimpse of the robot revolution through NAO, a new multilingual humanoid robot unveiled in 2015 by MUFG. Standing at 58-centimeters NAO is the first robot bank teller, able to read emotions and speak 19 languages potentially (currently English/Chinese/Japanese) to help travellers with currency exchange, money transfer and other banking questions.
For now, we need look no further than the excitement around the distributed ledger technology known as ‘blockchain’ - the technology underpinning Bitcoin - to see how financial institutions are racing to adapt, evolve and embrace fintech.
hype surrounding blockchain is focused on the technology’s ability to store complex transaction data across an intricate and shared network, making it incredibly difficult - if not near impossible - to falsify.
backdrop of a low interest rate environment and increasing scrutiny, regulation and competition, banks and financial organisations across the world are looking for new way to cut costs and improve efficiency. Blockchain technology has the potential to radically increase the speed, effectiveness and scope of core banking functions, in the process breaking down barriers, to making transaction instantaneous and global.
Soon banking beyond borders could be within reach.
Banks are examining the macro-economic and consumer-facing potential of blockchain, and the possibilities to create a viable digital currency.
near future we could see the first bank issued digital cryptocurrency enter the market - ushering in a new era of virtual currencies.
MUFG, as member of global blockchain consortium R3, is heavily involved in the development and progression of blockchain technology, as an investor and strategic partner with San Francisco-based Coinbase - the world’s most popular way to buy and sell Bitcoin.
‘MUFG Coin’; where blockchain technology could be applied for a variety of everyday financial needs, such as withdrawals and deposits to transactions and payments.
coin could have large-scale commercial potential, as well serving small-scale retail bank customers. Other than MUFG Coin, MUFG is testing another untitled digital currency rewards for employees who reduce their overtime hours and practice a healthy lifestyle, which resonates strongly to the work style reform of Abenomics.
group is also conducting a new digital currency trial through one of its subsidiaries, Kabu.com Securities Co, where employees will be awarded a blockchain-based currency called ‘OOIRI’ in recognition of good health as a new way to incentivize health and active lifestyles.
it will be those who have made the investment, taken the time to test the potential who may be grasping the greatest competitive advantage in banking for decades.
fintech is too great to ignore
MUFG there’s a collective commitment to ensure the group remains a champion of fintech.

Mitsubishi IBM Blockchain Cryptocurrency

Bitcoin And Stellar Get A Big Boost From IBM's 'Stable Coin'

9.27.2016 Currency Settlement Service CLS Reveals Big Blockchain Ambitions

CLS is building a payments netting service that will enable cash trades on IBM’s Fabric blockchain.
at the Sibos financial industry conference in Geneva, the service will mark the entrance into a new business category for New York-based CLS, which is historically known for providing settlement for traditional currency trades.
Early banks that have agreed to support the new blockchain platform include Bank of America, Bank of China (Hong Kong), Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ, Citibank, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley.
CLS Group CEO David Puth argued that the company’s wide customer base and global presence gives it an edge in bringing a new blockchain-based solution to the market
CLS does business with 21,000 institutions worldwide
CLS managing director Ram Komarraju said the offering will be built on a closed blockchain.
CLS Netting, the new product will rely more heavily for security and efficiency on the private distributed ledger.
CLS is a founding member of the Hyperledger initiative, along with fellow member IBM.
CLS is well positioned to bring a currency exchange product using blockchain to market.
CLS announced earlier this year it would extend its business partnership with IBM to help mitigate risk on the platform. But it turns out, that partnership now extends to blockchain services as well.