Binance Pay Opens USDT Spending at PayPay Merchants Across Japan
Overseas visitors can now pay with Tether at most PayPay-accepting stores via the HIVEX rails, while merchants settle in yen.
Illustration · generated, not a photograph
Binance Pay began allowing eligible overseas visitors to Japan to spend Tether (USDT) at most merchants that accept PayPay, the Japanese cashless payment service, as of Wednesday. Merchants receive settlement in yen, so they take on no crypto exposure.
The arrangement runs through HIVEX, an interoperability framework that links foreign QR payment services to Japan's PayPay merchant network. PayPay is accepted at millions of locations, ranging from large chains and small retailers to vending machines, taxis and public transport.
Binance said merchants do not need to opt in separately for the crypto option to work, and told Cointelegraph that it is the first crypto payment service to reach PayPay-supported merchants through HIVEX. PayPay already lists nine other overseas payment services on the same rails, mostly from China, Hong Kong and Taiwan.
For visitors, the practical effect is that USDT held in a Binance Pay wallet can be scanned at checkout wherever PayPay QR codes are accepted, without the user converting to yen first. The merchant's side of the transaction stays in the local currency.
Japan's inbound travel market provides the backdrop. The Japan Tourism Agency counted a record 42.7 million international visitors in 2025, and the country ranked ninth globally and first in Asia in the latest comparable ranking, which uses 2024 data.
Arrivals have cooled this year. The Japan National Tourism Organization recorded 3.1 million visitor arrivals in August, a 9.6% decline from the same month a year earlier, with the first eight months of 2026 totaling 27.6 million, down 2.7%.
That softer trend gives payment providers a reason to compete on convenience rather than volume alone. Crypto-linked QR payments remain a small slice of Japan's cashless landscape, and Binance Pay's access to PayPay's network puts it alongside established regional wallets rather than in a category of its own.
Binance has not disclosed which countries' users qualify as "eligible" under the service, nor the fee structure applied to USDT-to-yen settlement at the point of sale.
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