BITPoint Japan, the company behind Peach Aviation's move to let travelers use bitcoin to pay for tickets, is planning to give hundreds of thousands of retail outlets the ability to accept the digital currency.
"We're holding discussions with a retail-related company," Genki Oda, BITPoint's president, said in a recent interview. "By going through a company providing payment terminal services to shops, we have the possibility of increasing its use at one stroke. It's easier than talking to lots of individual retailers."
BITPoint is joining a flurry of companies embracing regulations, enacted in Japan last month, that recognize digital currencies as a form of payment. That has helped to make yen trades one of the world's largest transaction pools, exceeding China's pole position at the end of 2016, according to Oda. Bic Camera, one of the country's biggest electronics retailers, began accepting bitcoin at two stores in Tokyo last month.