Rakuten makes XRP move as Japanese conglomerates target crypto markets

Big Japanese firms are embracing crypto — particularly high-cap altcoins like XRP — to ensure they stay at the top of the food chain, says an industry insider.

Their comments come after Rakuten, a Japanese conglomerate with a market cap of almost $11 billion, unveiled plans to let e-pay customers spot-trade XRP or buy the Ripple-affiliated coin with their loyalty points. The firm will also let customers spend their XRP in stores via its s e-pay platform.

“Any [Japanese firm] with a large customer base who is at risk of losing it to crypto or web3 products is moving early to defend their position,” Shiv Shankar, CEO of the blockchain firm Boundless and the former head of compliance at Coinbase Japan, told DL News.

The news marks another signal that Japanese big tech firms are trying to muscle into a space traditionally dominated by crypto-native exchanges.

The development comes just weeks after a leading Japanese newspaper reported that some of the country’s top securities players are preparing to launch crypto exchange services. Other major Japanese conglomerates, such as Mitsubishi, are also making moves in the digital assets space.

E-commerce moves

Rakuten has a range of business interests in Japan. But it is most famous for its online marketplace operations, which it says have cornered around a quarter of the nation’s e-shopping market.

One of its biggest rivals, the $4 billion marketplace operator Mercari, has also moved into the crypto exchange space. The firm launched its Bitcoin trading service in March 2023, and said it had already accrued half a million customers by June of the same year.

Neither Rakuten nor Mercari’s Mercoin exchange make their crypto trading volume public, but Mercoin said it had 3 million users as of December 2024.

And a 2023 survey found that 50% of newer Japanese crypto investors — people who started trading coins at the end of 2022 — used either the Rakuten Wallet platform or Mercoin.

The traditional market leader, bitFlyer, was a distant third with 11%.

XRP is currently the third most popular coin on bitFlyer, per CoinGecko data. XRP-Japanese yen trades account for over 3% of trading volume on the crypto exchange over the past 24 hours.

Large token focus

The Rakuten news is a major coup for XRP advocates.

Rakuten’s XRP initiative signals that regulators don’t think the coin is problematic, Shankar said.

“Japan is almost exclusively focused on large tokens that have been around for a long time and have a good reputation and good distribution,” Shankar said. “The Japanese regulator rejects any sort of decentralised tokens or tokens that have any adverse history, so this is a really good signal.”

Ripple, the company that developed XRP, celebrated Rakuten’s move.

“There is a massive reservoir of value that can now flow into digital assets,” Tatsuya Kohrogi, Ripple’s senior ecosystem growth manager, wrote on LinkedIn. “This is a game-changer.”

Rakuten launched its Rakuten Wallet crypto trading service in 2019, a year after snapping up the permit-holding crypto exchange startup Everybody’s Bitcoin for around $2.5 million.

It has gradually added a wide range of coins to its platform over the years. Recent additions include Dogecoin, Stellar, Shiba Inu, Toncoin, Tron, Avalanche, and Solana.

At the end of 2019, Rakuten announced it would allow users to spend their loyalty points on crypto purchases, initially restricting loyalty point trading to Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Bitcoin Cash. To date, Rakuten has handed its users over 3 trillion points, worth an estimated total of $23 billion.

Users can spend a minimum of 100 Rakuten Points, worth 100 yen or $0.60, on each crypto purchase.

Tim Alper is a News Correspondent at DL News. Got a tip? Email him at tdalper@dlnews.com.