Japanese e-commerce giant Rakuten announced the launch of their own blockchain-based cryptocurrency called "Rakuten Coin" at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona yesterday. The announcement (along with other interesting data) can be seen in Rakuten's "Founder, Chariman and CEO", Hiroshi Mikitani keynote.
The token will be built on top of their loyalty points layer, Rakuten Super Points. To put this move in perspective, since the company launched Rakuten Super Points, 15 years ago, they issued over 1 Trillion of them, basically worth of over $9 billion now. So the new token will probably have a real marketcap of over $9 billion from the first day of launch, pushing the token in the 6th worldwide position (at the current prices).
Also worth noting is that Rakuten acquired some intellectual property of a Bitcoin payment processor, BitNet, 2 years ago.
We don't have a launch date yet, nor do we know if the token will be listed in exchanges and freely tradeable, just like any other crypto currency.
In my personal opinion, this one of the most disruptive moves we've seen, both by psychological impact and financial magnitude. Especially taking into account the fact that Rakuten's competitors: Alibaba, Amazon or eBay seems to be sleeping in their slippers, so to speak.
I'm a serial entrepreneur, blogger and ultrarunner. You can find me mainly on my blog at Dragos Roua where I write about productivity, business, relationships and running. Here on Steemit you may stay updated by following me 
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