Rakuten development good for Crypto adoption
Rakuten group on Monday 19th Aug 2019 announced the launch of their cryptocurrency wallet. The wallet will support the spot trading for following crypto assets – BTC, ETH, and BCH. As per the press release, there will be no fees for purchasing or selling crypto assets or depositing money.
So how they make money: The users will be charged for withdrawals of Japanese Yen and crypto-assets. So more they encourage withdraws (spend), the more they earn. Therefore, it is expected [inlinetweet]Rakuten may integrate the wallet to their existing ecosystem which offers 70+ services across 30 countries serving nearly over 1 billion users.[/inlinetweet]
The largest firms do not typically make a move into a new market unless they see the promising potential. Currently, many enterprises are preparing to build their own blockchain services and cryptocurrencies namely JP Morgan, Facebook, Walmart, Kakao, etc. Unlike these enterprises, Rakuten group is building a digital wallet which could potentially create mass-scale adoption of Bitcoin and other crypto-assets.
How? Rakuten Group’s broad range of services includes e-commerce, travel, fin-tech – cards/ online payments /Banking, Insurance, Energy, Digital streaming content (TV) and Communication. [inlinetweet]By linking these diverse services into Rakuten crypto wallet can provide a crypto payment option for its users.[/inlinetweet]
What makes Rakuten group so successful?
Rakuten has a loyalty program called ‘Rakuten Super Points’ which enables and encourages user engagement across multiple platforms and services, thereby minimizing the customer acquisition costs and maximizes the lifetime retention of users in their platform.
Users can utilize these earned points in the affiliate stores such as conventional store (Circle K), Restaurants, Online stores, etc.
5 years back when RSP was launched, they had 42,000+ stores where users can spend these loyalty points.
Creating Crypto payment adoption
Rakuten Wallet Inc. could leverage on this established ecosystem and allow Wallet users to pay for services or products bought from affiliate stores. Much like BitPay and Coinbase which allows merchants to set a process to convert Bitcoin to USD or fiat instantly.
What that means is when merchants accept a 100$ payment in Bitcoin, regardless of the price fluctuation, they receive $100. Rakuten’s RSP program partners could integrate such process and start accepting Bitcoin payments.
Given the large span of services and global userbase, Rakuten crypto Wallet integration with Rakuten ecosystem could drive mass adoption of Bitcoin payments.
