"It was more convenient than I expected, and with a 10% cashback rate, it actually seems more advantageous than a regular payment."
Saito Shota, JPYC's head of business development and marketing, made the remark Saturday after demonstrating a yen stablecoin payment at a CJ Olive Young store in Seocho-gu, Seoul.
JPYC is a stablecoin pegged one-to-one to the yen and is issued and circulated on blockchains including Kaia, Polygon, Ethereum and Avalanche. As of Saturday, cumulative issuance had reached 7.49 billion yen ($47.1 million), or about 65 billion won.
During the demonstration, Saito accessed the Unifi mini-app on his smartphone and purchased a CJ Olive Young mobile gift voucher. After logging in with a Line account, a voucher purchase screen appeared alongside the tagline "JPYC — the digital yen you need when traveling." Vouchers were available in denominations of 10,000 won, 30,000 won and 50,000 won, priced at 1,139 yen, 3,417 yen and 5,694 yen respectively.
After selecting JPYC as the payment method and entering a password, the purchase was completed in five seconds. The screen displayed a payment confirmation along with a notice that users could check whether points had been credited. At the time, Unifi was running a promotion offering 10 percent back on JPYC payments.
Saito then picked up a 3,900-won breath-freshening candy from a shelf and paid at a self-checkout counter using the 10,000-won voucher he had just purchased. JPYC cannot currently be used for direct payment at CJ Olive Young stores in South Korea — users must first buy a mobile gift voucher through the Unifi app. The app also supports JPYC purchases of gift vouchers for Daiso, CU and E-mart.
Saito also walked through the process of converting a purchased voucher back into yen stablecoins. When he requested a refund on a 30,000-won CJ Olive Young voucher from his purchase history, a notice appeared stating, "This voucher will be invalidated and cannot be used afterward," and the wallet address that had sent the JPYC was shown as the refund destination.
The refund, however, took considerably longer than the original payment. After submitting the refund request, Saito browsed the store for more than 30 minutes and completed another purchase, yet the JPYC had still not been returned.
"In actual operations, the processing time can vary by service because each refund request needs to be verified as legitimate," Saito said, adding that speed also depends on the degree of automation. He noted that transferring or returning funds on the JPYC network takes "about 10 minutes."
The standout aspect of the demonstration was that a yen stablecoin issued in Japan had crossed a border to enable real-world consumer spending in South Korea.
When Japanese tourists use credit cards in South Korea, foreign transaction fees are applied through card networks and international payment systems. If a yen-based stablecoin can be used abroad without conversion, it could reduce intermediary steps and lower costs for users.
"Foreign transaction fees on Japanese credit cards run quite high, at 3.5 to 5 percent," Saito said. "Using a stablecoin based on your home currency reduces the number of intermediaries, which can lower the costs users bear." He added that if stablecoin payments are implemented seamlessly, users would no longer need to manually select a currency during checkout.
Saito also said the spread of home-currency stablecoins could boost demand for government bonds. Because a portion of a stablecoin's reserve assets is typically held in government bonds, wider issuance and use could lift demand for those securities.
At present, JPYC sees more use in decentralized finance, or DeFi, than in physical retail. "Fundamentally, it is most widely used in DeFi, and there is strong demand for swapping it into dollar stablecoins such as USDC on Uniswap," Saito said. According to JPYC Info, on-chain transaction volume for JPYC on Saturday totaled 146.4 million JPYC.
Efforts to expand JPYC's real-world use cases are continuing both inside and outside Japan. In South Korea, the company connects Japanese tourist spending on shopping and travel to JPYC through Line Next's Unifi platform. In Japan, it is broadening everyday use — including a pilot program using the HashPort Wallet to pay at Lawson convenience stores.
JPYC is also pushing into business-to-business payments. The company signed an MOU with AZ-COM Maruwa Holdings, a logistics firm with roughly 3,000 member companies, to explore using JPYC for settlement payments.
Saito said the key to mainstreaming stablecoins lies not simply in adding more payment venues, but in creating incentives and value that give users a reason to hold them.
"Payments themselves are already convenient enough, and businesses have reason to adopt them because fees are lower," he said. "But if there are no users holding JPYC, it doesn't matter how many places accept it."
"We need a virtuous cycle — giving JPYC economic value through rewards and various benefits, then connecting that back to financial products and payments," he said. "Creating a reason for users to hold JPYC is what matters most."
kyoung@heraldcorp.com
