Massive Bitcoin Adoption Wave: Japan’s Second-Biggest E-Commerce Giant to Accept BTC Payments With Next Upgrade

• Mercari, which has over three billion listings and over 20 million monthly active users, will allow users to purchase items on its marketplace using Bitcoin starting in June.
• The platform partnered with Melcoin, a Tokyo-based exchange, which will convert the BTC paid to the sellers to yen in real-time in one of the most significant Bitcoin pushes in the country.

A Bitcoin spot ETF may be incoming this month, but as some have pointed out, BTC will not take off until it finds more use cases in daily life. In Japan, over 20 million tech-savvy people will be exposed to BTC after one of the country’s top e-commerce platforms announced that it will allow Bitcoin payments starting in June.

Mercari, Japan’s largest community-powered marketplace, will open the doors to Bitcoin on its platform. It will become the first major e-commerce platform to allow crypto payments, reports Nikkei, Japan’s largest financial newspaper and the world’s largest by circulation.

While Bitcoin adoption is high in Japan and has been since 2017, direct payments with the crypto are rare, Nikkei reports. However, with crypto becoming ever easier to use as wallets become simpler to operate and safer, Mercari wants to position itself to reap the benefits of massive adoption.

Established in 2013, Mercari offers a marketplace where consumers can sell to each other. Its popularity has spiked, and it boasts 22 million monthly users, with some reports claiming it has a 94% market share of the consumer-to-consumer sector. It reports sales of over 10 billion yen each month, and in Q3 last year, it reported a profit of 2.8 billion yen.

On the Mercari platform, the items will be displayed in yen, but consumers can choose to make payments directly in crypto. The platform has partnered with a local exchange that will convert the crypto into yen in real-time, with the seller never realising that Bitcoin was ever used.

Bitcoin for Payments in Japan

While a significant avenue, Mercari isn’t the first major platform globally to announce crypto payments support. In the US, companies like Overstock, Starbucks and Microsoft are among those who have, at one point, jumped on the Bitcoin payments bandwagon.

However, many have found that Bitcoin payments aren’t as practical as imagined. One of the major hurdles is the BTC fees. At press time, the fees stand at $9.65, according to YCharts. In the past month, they have hit as high as $37 in mid-December. This makes paying for small items with Bitcoin impractical. For instance, a cup of coffee at Starbucks is below $5. Paying with Bitcoin for this coffee would cost the customer more than twice the price of the coffee in fees.

One solution is using other cryptos to make the payments. XRP, for instance, is $0.001 at press time, and in the past year, the highest it has hit has been $0.025 for a brief window in June last year, according to data from Bit Info Charts.