Rakuten Wallet users in Japan can now convert loyalty points to XRP and spend at 5M+ merchants. $23B in points now redeemable for crypto via Rakuten Pay. Japan just handed 44 million consumers a live XRP spending account. Not a whitepaper. Not a pilot. It went live today. Rakuten Wallet users can now convert Rakuten Points directly into XRP inside the app. Spot trading is available too. Both features went live simultaneously, according to the official announcement from Rakuten Wallet. Your Loyalty Points Just Got a Crypto On-Ramp Nobody Saw Coming The spend side is what makes this different. Converted XRP can be used across 5 million-plus merchant locations through Rakuten Pay. That is not a test network. Those are live retail points of sale, already embedded in everyday Japanese commerce. RippleXDev posted on X that approximately $23 billion in Rakuten loyalty points are now redeemable for XRP. RippleXDev called it one of the largest retail deployments of XRP as a payment method to date. Left it at that. The loyalty pool matters here. Rakuten Points is one of Japan’s most widely held reward currencies. Consumers accumulate points through shopping, travel bookings, and financial services across the Rakuten Group. Converting those points into a spendable digital asset, one already clearing millions in daily volume globally, changes the calculus for how Japanese retail customers interact with crypto. $23 Billion in Points Is Not a Small Experiment The infrastructure piece is Rakuten Wallet, the group’s licensed crypto exchange. It holds regulatory approval under Japan’s Financial Services Agency. That approval is what lets the conversion and in-app trading features operate without running through a third party. The points-to-XRP flow, as outlined in the announcement, keeps everything inside one app. Users convert, trade, and pay from the same interface. No separate wallet. No bridging step. For retail crypto adoption, removing those friction points is usually what either makes or breaks a deployment at scale. Japan has long been one of the more crypto-forward retail markets, with licensed exchanges operating since 2017. Even against that backdrop, embedding XRP directly into a rewards program sitting on top of 44 million active payment users is a different order of magnitude. For context on how XRP’s retail integration has been building, Exodus recently added native XRP Ledger support and RLUSD integration as wallets push toward full ecosystem interaction. How Rakuten Pay Becomes the Merchant Bridge Rakuten Pay’s 5 million merchant footprint already includes convenience stores, restaurants, and major retail chains. The new feature layers XRP spending onto an existing payments rail. Merchants do not need new hardware. The settlement routing happens on the backend. That architecture, loyalty program feeds into crypto conversion, conversion feeds into a payment app already accepted nationwide, is, per RippleXDev’s X post, what makes this deployment structurally different from earlier crypto-at-retail experiments. The move fits a broader pattern. XRP has been positioning itself across payment infrastructure at multiple layers. SWIFT’s own blockchain ledger announcement had observers noting XRP’s adjacent positioning inside traditional finance rails, where Ripple’s technology sits quietly inside institutions that have not issued press releases about it. Rakuten Group did issue a press release. The full technical document is available at rakuten-wallet.co.jp. The deployment, as of today, is live. The post Rakuten Wallet Users in Japan Can Now Convert Loyalty Points to XRP and Spend via Rakuten Pay appeared first on Live Bitcoin News.

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