Railways Group, the biggest railway and subway operator in that is used by millions of Japanese individuals on a daily basis, is considering the integration of crypto assets like as a payment option.
According to ANN News, a mainstream commercial television network in run by TV Asahi Corporation, JR Group is currently planning to establish a company, possibly an exchange in partnership with a major bank, to integrate .
Massive Boost in Crypto and bitcoin Adoption
If JR Group moves forward with its plans to integrate crypto into the Suica card, the national public transport card that is used by residents for various payments including subway transactions, it has the potential to become the biggest stimulus in retail and mainstream to date.
Based on the report of ANN News and the reported plans of JR Group to establish a new venture, it is likely that the company would like to create its own exchange or infrastructure to process payments, similar to Rakuten.
Last year, Rakuten, the biggest e-commerce company in known as the country’s Amazon, a exchange called everybody’s for $2 million and placed the exchange under its subsidiary called Rakuten Payments.
Local analysts speculated that Rakuten acquired the exchange to potentially integrate crypto payment options into its platform in the future without passing the profits generated to a third party such as a exchange or a payment service provider.
By creating its own company, JR Group will be able to generate a new source of revenue in the form of transaction fees from payments it processes.
The Railways Group also ferries cargo, alongside millions of travelers every day. | Source: Shutterstock
The ambitious business model of JR Group to establish its own venture and quite possibly create a competing exchange suggests that if the company integrates a crypto payment option, it expects the demand from users to be sufficiently high to justify the allocation of new resources into a new venture.
There also exists a possibility that JR Group the integration of bank-created and Mizuho, a leading financial institution in , is currently in the process of developing a .
is the ideal market for a transport conglomerate to integrate due to the large mainstream awareness of crypto.
Recently, Bitwise Asset Management revealed in a presentation to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission () that 95 percent of the volume in the crypto market is fake and that only a handful of exchanges have real daily volume.
Among the exchanges with real daily volume was BitFlyer, the biggest exchange in , and the rest of the exchanges were based in the U.S.
5/ Only 10 exchanges have >$1M real daily trade volume. , , , , , , , , , /
You can see the daily trade volume on these exchanges at:
— Bitwise (@BitwiseInvest)
remains as the second largest market, mostly in part due to the forward-thinking and open-minded approach of Japanese regulators toward and technology.
Japan is already leading in merchant adoption
Bic Camera, the largest electronics retailer in , has been accepting for over a year and in mid-2018, amidst an 85 percent correction in the crypto market, Bic Camera disclosed that the usage of across its stores nationwide has increased.
Masanari Matsumoto, Bic Camera’s PR and IR Chief, .com:
When Bic Camera first installed the payment system in its stores, we expected that the paying in would mostly be foreigners. We noticed that was becoming very popular. Then the government announced that was officially legal, so we finally felt more comfortable introducing as a method of payment in our stores. Bic Camera always aims at responding to its ’ demands, and there was a huge demand at the time.
In the months to come, as the industry of grows with the involvement of conglomerates, merchant and overall mainstream of are expected to grow.
Published at Fri, 29 Mar 2019 12:55:57 +0000
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