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2026年08月19日

Three Consortia Competed at the Same Lawson Register in August — The Real Contest in Stablecoin Payments Is Not About the Coin

ローソンのレジで3陣営が競合した8月──ステーブルコイン決済の本当の争点は「コイン」ではない

Three Trials at the Same Retail Chain in One Month

The trial ran for a single day on August 20 at one store, the Lawson Gate City Osaki Atrium branch. Participants were limited to employees of JCB, Lawson and Digital Garage. It used a Consumer-Presented Mode design in which the customer displays a barcode encoding their wallet address on a smartphone and the store's point-of-sale terminal reads it. The supported wallet was Coinbase's Base App, and the supported asset was USDC on the Base chain. JCB provided the customer-facing web system and barcode generation, received USDC from customers, aggregated the proceeds and will pay the merchant in fiat at a later date. Digital Garage supplied the payment API and back-end and provided technical support; Lawson provided the store environment and the point-of-sale integration. The connection between the terminal and the payment service used code-payment processing technology from Canal Payment Service.

What stands out is that this was the third such trial at Lawson in August. On August 6, a trial of yen-denominated JPYC was conducted at the Takanawa Gateway City store with HashPort and KDDI, described as Japan's first point-of-sale-linked implementation. On August 17, at the same Gate City Osaki Atrium store used for the later trial, NETSTARS ran a verification of USDC, USDT and JPYC using its Stablecoin Pay product. All three limited participants to insiders, and their verification items — point-of-sale integration requirements, impact on register operations, time to payment completion, wallet usability — overlap almost entirely. Within two weeks, three different intermediary-layer designs were auditioned in front of the same cash register.

The Licence Nobody Holds

Underneath this pattern sits a regulatory constraint. In Japan, stablecoins were positioned as electronic payment instruments by the amended Payment Services Act that took effect in June 2023, and intermediating them as a business requires registration as an electronic payment instruments service provider. Yet according to the Financial Services Agency's register, as of June 24, 2026, the total number of registrants was one: SBI VC Trade, registered with the Director-General of the Kanto Local Finance Bureau under number 00001, handling USDC, RLUSD and JPYSC.

When JCB takes on the role of receiving USDC from customers, aggregating proceeds and later paying merchants in fiat, whether that constitutes the regulated intermediation business, or is instead structured as collection agency or funds transfer activity, cannot be determined from the published materials. That all three trials stopped at one day or a few days, one store, and insiders only suggests the binding constraint is unresolved regulatory characterisation rather than technology. Notably, the trial the same three parties ran from February 24 to March 2 at a café in the Shibuya Parco DG building was open to general customers. Scale has, if anything, contracted. That the SBI group can advance its own trials through the pairing of SBI VC Trade and Aplus is possible precisely because it holds the sole registration in-house — a telling contrast.

Who Actually Bears the Cost of "Reducing the Currency Exchange Burden"?

In their July 14 memorandum, JCB and Circle cited reduced currency exchange burden for inbound visitors, greater settlement efficiency, and improved merchant cash flow as the benefits of stablecoin payments. All three warrant careful scrutiny.

First, as long as a yen-priced good is paid for in dollar-denominated USDC, the foreign exchange conversion does not disappear; it moves from the airport counter to inside the payment rail. Without disclosure of who converts at what rate and who absorbs the spread, whether the burden has been reduced cannot be assessed. Second, on cash flow, the present design has JCB paying merchants in fiat at a later date. That is structurally identical to a card settlement cycle, so it does not follow that the merchant's receipt timing improves. Even if the on-chain leg settles almost instantly, routing merchant receipt back through an existing settlement cycle retains the speed gain within the intermediary layer. The substantive benefit for merchants therefore collapses into a single question: whether the fee rate undercuts existing card and code payments. Yen-denominated JPYC removes the foreign exchange problem, but then faces the different obstacle of persuading inbound visitors to hold a yen-denominated coin. USDC and JPYC are being trialled in parallel precisely because of this trade-off.

The Regulatory Side Is Moving in Parallel

Official activity has coincided. The amended Payment Services Act came fully into force on June 1, 2026, clarifying the compliance path for foreign-issued trust-type stablecoins. On August 7, the Financial Services Agency created a Crypto Asset and Stablecoin Division in a wider reorganisation. Separately, foreign-issued stablecoins are subject to caps on per-transfer amounts and per-user balances, which pose no practical problem at convenience store ticket sizes but require separate treatment of aggregate merchant receipts. With regulation and implementation advancing simultaneously, what firms need to settle first is not the technology but the legal characterisation of the flow of funds.

[Business Development Insights]

  1. The competition is over the intermediary layer between wallet and point-of-sale, not over coins or merchants. The fact that three distinct intermediary designs — the HashPort and KDDI grouping, NETSTARS, and the JCB and Digital Garage grouping — lined up at the same Lawson register demonstrates it. The merchant is shared; the coins overlap across USDC, JPYC and USDT. What differentiates is the point-of-sale connection method, who performs settlement, and how the arrangement is legally characterised. The question for a financial institution is not which coin to support but which position in this intermediary layer to occupy, and which existing payment-processing and acquiring capabilities transfer directly into it.
  2. That Japan has only one registered electronic payment instruments service provider is both a bottleneck and an opportunity. Merchant-acceptance trials are running across multiple consortia, yet only one entity may currently intermediate stablecoins as a business. That asymmetry should not be expected to persist, and firms need to settle the three-way choice — obtain the registration, partner with a registrant, or specialise in functions that do not require it — as a premise of the business plan rather than an afterthought. The function of receiving from customers and settling merchants in fiat in particular demands very different infrastructure and capital depending on which regulatory framework applies. Deferring that analysis while pushing ahead with technical validation invites a redesign just before commercial launch.
  3. Whoever can disaggregate and disclose the fee stack will control commercialisation. For merchants, the value of stablecoin payments reduces to whether it is cheaper than existing methods. The real cost decomposes into the foreign exchange spread, on-chain gas, the funding cost implied by settlement timing, and the intermediary's take. None of the published trial announcements addresses this breakdown. Conversely, whoever first offers a product design that presents the breakdown transparently gains a decisive advantage in merchant evaluation. For financial institutions and card companies that understand interchange economics intimately, this is a domain where existing expertise applies directly.

[Sources]

Supervisor

Akihisa Ishida

Cabinet Inc. Founder CEO

Since 2017, He has been consistently engaged in token and NFT utilization, blockchain game planning and development, and NFT-based business development. Having contributed to over 80 blockchain products—including projects for major entertainment companies listed in Tokyo Stock Exchange —He has served in various key roles such as Business Lead, Designer, PM, and Advisor. In 2021, founded Cabinet Inc.

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