Yahoo! Japan Corp. Set To Buy A Minority Stake In Crypto Exchange BitARG

According to reports from April 2018, Yahoo! Japan explained they will acquire a 40 percent stake in the BitARG exchange in Tokyo, now named TaoTao and we are about to read more in today’s blockchain news.

The report reads:

 “Yahoo Japan Corp said on Friday it would buy a minority stake in a Tokyo-based cryptocurrency exchange, becoming the latest major Japanese financial services provider to shrug off security concerns and join the digital money industry.’’

Before this major announcement, Yahoo also stated that they are preparing to launch their own cryptocurrency exchange. So why are giants such as Yahoo diving into crypto?

In Japan, the largest financial institutions and tech giants including SBI Holdings, Yahoo!, Bic Camera and Rakuten are now heavily involved in the crypto industry. Rakuten for example, acquired a crypto exchange last year for about $2 million in order to improve the infrastructure and to be able to accept crypto payments. Bic Camera which is the largest electronic retailer in the country also integrated a Bitcoin payment system for all the stores around the country.

It’s not just Japan. In the United States, major financial institutions such as ICE, Nasdaq and Fidelity released their own crypto-related products because of the market boom that is expected. Also, the investor Andreessen Horowitz said that conglomerates believe cryptocurrencies is an asset class:

‘’With crypto, it’s worse in most ways than the old computing platform in that it’s slow, it’s complex, it’s lacking a lot of features, but it has one feature that has never existed before and that is trust. Trust is super powerful. You don’t have to trust the government, Twitter, Facebook, or the other people on the network. You just have to trust math. That opens a very interesting world for developers because you can develop applications like money. Nobody has been able to program money before.’’

Some of the employees of Yahoo! Japan will now work on BitARG or TaoTao crypto exchange and according to a Nikkei report it says that:

 “Starting next month, YJFX executives and engineers will be dispatched to BitARG, where they will spend about a year developing the new exchange system. They will also work on a corporate governance structure, a customer management system and internal controls.’’