Japanese E-Commerce Giant Rakuten’s App To Support Crypto Payments

One of the largest e-commerce companies in Japan-Rakuten announced a new update that we look into in today’s crypto news for their Rakuten Pay mobile app that will reportedly support cryptocurrency payments according to their official press release.

Rakuten is known as the Amazon of Japan which includes the cryptocurrency exchange ‘’Everybody’s Bitcoin’’ as a part of the payment subsidiary-Rakuten Payment. The payment subsidiary will include the prepaid card service of the corporation Rakuten Edy.

The earnings release of the company notes that Edy will be supported in the newly updated app and will provide support for QR code payments. The update doesn’t say which crypto will be supported nor does it explicitly mention crypto support but says that ‘’all payment solutions’’ will be supported on the platform as a part of the subsidiary, Rakuten Payment.

Rakuten acquired the Everybody’s Bitcoin crypto exchange back in August 2018 which cost about $2.4 million deal. The representatives of the company made clear that the firm is considering entering the crypto exchange industry because the role of cryptocurrency payment in e-commerce will grow in the near future.

Also, in the earnings release, Rakuten showed a net income for 2018 of nearly 142 billion yen which is about $1.3 billion which is a 24 percent increase since 2017. Back in 2015, Rakuten announced they started accepting Bitcoin (BTC) as a method of payment according to their official American portal Rakuten.com.

It’s interesting that another Japanese finance giant SBI Holdings also seems to be extremely interested in crypto. The company even launched its own crypto exchange dubbed Vctrade in July 2018 and the exchange accepts deposits in some of the largest cryptocurrencies by the end of December 2018.