LINE Announces 5 Dapps in Push to Build Its Token Economy

Messaging giant LINE has officially announced the first five decentralized apps (dapps) to launch on its custom blockchain platform.

The company said in a press release Friday that prediction, question-and-answer, product review, food review and location review dapps will launch in the coming weeks as the company works to build up its own token economy. As part of that effort, LINE will also begin offering its link token to markets outside Japan through its BitBox exchange next month, although not within the U.S.

The dapps specifically will be called Wizball, which rewards users for answering questions; 4CAST, which creates a prediction market; Pasha, which rewards users for posting product reviews; TAPAS, which similarly rewards users for posting food reviews; and STEP, which incentivizes users to "share their stories of recreational activities and holiday trips."

While the review dapps will be released sometime in 2018, no timeline was provided for for Wizball or 4CAST, both of which remain in beta versions at the moment. Moreover, the latter two are in Japanese only for the moment.

The moves are part of a broader effort to build a "co-creation economy," the company explained.

The release added:

"The LINE Token Economy concept uses LINE's internally-developed blockchain network, LINK Chain (mainnet), to build a LINK Ecosystem that aims to flatten the relationship structure between users and service providers to promote co-creation and mutual growth ... LINE is preparing to publicly release a development kit in anticipation of third-party services to join the LINK Ecosystem starting 2019 (tentative)."

Releasing this kit will allow service providers to join a token economy without need to develop their own blockchain platform, the release added.

LINE first announced it would support dapps on its platform in April, when it released a roadmap for its blockchain.

The company has since announced newer details of its platform, including that it plans to go live with its LINK token and a scaling solution in December.

Editor's note: The piece has been updated to amend the apps' names.

Line app image via Peter Austin / Shutterstock