The Japan-based company, which made its name in social media with its popular messaging application, also said it would keeping moving forward with its range of services that cover media, entertainment, business and commerce.

At its annual Line Conference in Japan, the company said it would do so by redesigning its existing services to become more focused on customers. This user-centric approach would be applied to the roll-out of services in the future, the company said.

The company said that, for the financial sector, it would “build a payment revolution” through its Line Pay platform as well as create new financial infrastructure built with blockchain.

It announced the Line Token Economy concept, which uses blockchain technology custom-developed by the company to reward users with Line’s own currency for reviewing services. The company plans to spread this token economy out into other, non-Line services.

The company also announced plans for a cryptocurrency exchange, Bitbox, on which users can make exchanges with digital currencies in countries around the world, except Japan and the United States. The exchange will support more than 30 types of digital coins and will be available in 15 languages. The platform is due to start next month.

Takeshi Idezawa, president and chief executive officer of Line Corporation, said that the company is moving forward with full-scale research and development efforts into blockchain technology.

In April, it established the Line Blockchain Lab, a research organisation within Line for designing and developing dApp services, and has established Unblock, a subsidiary for designing the token economy.

In May the company entered into a global blockchain project called Icon and established Unchain, which is for developing token economy-related technologies.

Hisahiro Chofuku, director and chief operating officer of Line Pay Corporation, said that the company aims to turn Japan into cashless and wallet-less society under the company’s “Line Pay revolution”.

Cashless payments in Japan account for 18.4 per cent of transactions. Chofuku said Line Pay would create “a new flow of money among Line users (peer to peer) and between users and companies”. By May, Line Pay saw 125,214 million monthly transactions worldwide, including countries and territories such as Japan, Thailand, Taiwan and Indonesia.

The company aims to increase the number of merchants accepting Line Pay to more than 1 million locations in Japan alone. To achieve this goal, it has joined with QuicPay to expand the Line Pay service via near field communication (NFC) to around 720,000 locations in Japan.

NFC is the newest payment service from Line Pay, apart from Line PayCard, and QR/barcode payment. It also launched the Line Pay app for merchants without transaction fees for three years from August 2018. It offers incentive of around 3 to 5 per cent of transactions coming back to the merchants that use Line Pay via QR and barcode.

On the AI front, Line continued to promote its virtual assistant Clova in the market.

Jun Masuda, director and chief strategy marketing officer of Line Corporation, said that Clova will come in more characters such as Doraemon and Minion, and it will be more connected to home appliances for the smart home concept. The company has joined with Toyota to launch Clova Auto as an AI assistant for drivers.