Lawson Completes Second Pilot of POS Stablecoin Payments

The Japanese convenience store chain Lawson has tested stablecoin payments at its POS terminals. The pilot using USD Coin (USDC), Tether (USDT), and JPYC was completed on August 17 at the Gate City Osaki Atrium store. This pilot is the second phase of the initial trial conducted by Lawson in collaboration with HashPort and KDDI on August 6, aimed at verifying whether stablecoin payments are suitable for actual operations while maintaining the existing checkout flow. Payments were made through the MetaMask wallet, and various patterns such as payment speed and error situations were examined. Transactions are settled in Japanese yen, and stores receive yen just like traditional barcode payments. Representatives from Lawson and Netstars described this pilot as a preliminary experiment to assess the feasibility of commercialization. The payment speed was generally processed within 5 seconds, which is a crucial factor in the convenience store environment. Netstars set the transaction fee at 0.98%, and users do not need to prepare any separate native tokens. However, they noted that coordination regarding the handling of Tether is necessary.