RelianceIndustries is famous for launching companies and disrupting industries in India. They did it with petroleum and telecom recently with the launch of India’s first LTE network Jio and promote its native apps for almost everything ranging from messaging to video streaming. They changed how LTE pricing works in India by launching the most cost-effective option for LTE data which also forced major telecom providers in the country to match the tariff.
With the similar theme, the company is said to be launching an ICO to launch its own digital currency and it will be named as ‘Jio coin’. The announcement only gives details about a 25 member team which is yet to start actively working on ‘JioCoin’ and it will be lead by the billionaire’s son Akash Ambani. The team said to be working on various blockchain related projects ranging from JioCoin to smart contracts for supply chain logistics.
The company which has a subscribers base of around 152 million people plans to also use this coins as reward programs making the customers part of the homegrown digital currencyJioCoin. This sure does sound like a reward program like Kohl’s Cash except you can exchange, trade and pay in other stores. A market of 1.3 billion people whose average age is below 25 is very appealing for homegrown companies to miss out on. It’s usually the American and Chinese companies who come up with new products or technologies into the country, but slowly the native Indian companies have aggressively pushing better technology to wither the competition.
Few other domains the company is trying to foray is into IOT and it plans to use JioCoin or related blockchain technologies in this kind of projects. The JioCoin ICO date has not been released yet and ironically the domain, jiocoin.com is parked by a Chinese company.
An email has been sent to Jio’s press relations and further information will be updated here soon.