Rakuten Wallet adds XRP
Rakuten Wallet said it added XRP for buy, sell and payments and plans merchant integration spanning about five million merchants, a move that could shift loyalty‑point flows into crypto balance sheets. The update was reported alongside other fintech partnership news that highlights growing institutional and retail interest in tokenised payment rails. (x.com/InvestWithD/status/2044013900862198209, x.com/BankXRP/status/2043960001958424772)
Rakuten Wallet has added XRP, extending the token from trading into payments inside Rakuten’s consumer finance network in Japan. (coindesk.com) CoinDesk reported on April 14 that Rakuten plans to let its 44 million customers use XRP as a payment method. A second CoinDesk report on April 15 said the rollout ties XRP into Rakuten Pay, where users can spend across more than 5 million merchants. (coindesk.com, coindesk.com) The same reports said users can buy XRP with Rakuten Points and hold it in Rakuten Wallet. Rakuten said in 2022 that cumulative Rakuten Points issued had passed 3 trillion, giving the loyalty program unusual scale for a crypto on-ramp. (coindesk.com, global.rakuten.com) Rakuten has been building this bridge for years. In December 2019, Rakuten Wallet launched a service that let users convert Rakuten Super Points into crypto assets through the wallet app. (global.rakuten.com) In February 2021, Rakuten Payment and Rakuten Wallet said users could charge Rakuten Cash with Bitcoin and other crypto assets, then spend that balance at Rakuten Pay and Rakuten Point Card merchants in Japan. The company said at the time that it was the first service in Japan to use crypto assets as a source of electronic money payments without handling fees. (global.rakuten.com) That makes the XRP addition less a one-off listing than an expansion of an existing payments rail. Rakuten’s fintech segment already includes Rakuten Wallet as its crypto-asset exchange service, and the broader Rakuten ecosystem says it has more than 100 million members in Japan. (global.rakuten.com, global.rakuten.com) The immediate test is whether loyalty points become a regular path into XRP balances, not just a trading feature. CoinDesk said the integration embeds XRP inside a large consumer ecosystem, linking rewards, wallet custody and merchant checkout in one app flow. (coindesk.com) Rakuten’s own history shows the company has favored tightly connected consumer finance products over standalone crypto features. If this rollout holds, XRP will sit inside the same loop Rakuten has used to move shoppers from points to stored value to checkout. (global.rakuten.com, global.rakuten.com)
