Now, everyone, lend me your ears. This is the story of a certain business venture that took place in the Reiwa era.
First, please imagine this. In the wallet of your smartphone—right there—you have digital dollars worth $10,000. Remittances to family, payments to overseas business partners—everything has been handled with just this. What a dependable wallet.
However, the very moment I tried to pay at the local shop, this huge sum turns into “unspendable money.” Why? It’s because the register won’t accept it.
Don’t make the mistake of thinking this is a made-up story. USDT circulating on TRON exceeds 94 billion dollars, and boasts the largest outstanding issuance by chain. Total account count is 405 million, and cumulative transaction volume has surpassed 30 trillion dollars. About half of all the USDT in circulation has gathered right here. For so long, this gigantic “digital dollar wallet” has been turned away at the door of store cash registers in the city.
That tightly shut door finally opened. The date was September 29, 2026. WalletConnect announced that with its own payment infrastructure—“WalletConnect Pay”—it would begin handling TRON’s USDT.
Let me say this first. This isn’t a quiet notice that “one more supported currency has been added.” The initiative in payments has shifted—from the shop to the customer. That is a major event.
The outline of the announcement is extremely simple. Merchants and payment service providers (PSPs) could, with a single integration effort, begin receiving TRON’s USDT both in-store and online.
For the received payments, you can deposit them as stablecoins into your own wallet. Or, through partners under regulation, you can have them land in a bank account in fiat currency. And on top of that, they say that for every payment, the matching against the sanctions list and travel-rule compliance is built in from the very beginning. It’s been thought through so thoroughly.
What is WalletConnect—moving from a “connection service” to a “payments service”
Now, many customers may not be familiar with the name “WalletConnect.” This company, which was born in 2018, originally was a “connection layer” that linked wallets and apps through encrypted communication. In a way, it was like the stagehand in a play. But this stagehand—by 2025, the transactions it mediated exceeded 400 billion dollars. More than 700 connected wallets, and over 500 million end users waiting beyond that. It was an incredible workhorse.
And in 2026, this stagehand finally leaps onto the main stage. The target was payments. In January, it announced a partnership with Ingenico of France, which deploys payment terminals in 120 countries worldwide, laying the groundwork to spread stablecoin payments to more than 40 million in-store terminals.
The connection with TRON was also made in this year, 2026. On January 21, WalletConnect announced support for the TRON network, connecting more than 600 wallets and 70,000 dApps to the TRON economic ecosystem. In other words, the “road” opened in January, and the “shops” opened in September. The structure and the timing are truly marvelous.
Now, let’s follow the actual flow. When it comes to accounting, the shop presents a QR code or a payment link. At the store, you can also use tap payments. The customer opens their wallet and selects TRON’s USDT as the payment method.
Then WalletConnect Pay assembles the transaction—now here’s the crucial part. The amount and the destination are already fixed before the customer signs. The customer only needs to check what’s inside and sign.
Then WalletConnect Pay sends everything out to the TRON network, and keeps letting you know step by step until the approvals are complete. The shop receives the payment data for verification, and the bookkeeping is handled automatically—so it goes.
If you’ve ever shopped with crypto assets, you’ll know the preciousness of this setup down to your bones. Copy down long alphanumeric addresses, enter the amount by hand, choose the network, and press the send button as if in prayer. If you make even one character’s mistake, the money usually doesn’t come back. That nasty ritual in your heart has completely vanished.
The essence is threefold—let’s unravel this case step by step.
First, the shop now aligns itself with the customer’s balance. A customer wants to pay from whatever balance they already have. If that balance is TRON’s USDT, and the cashier can’t accept it, the customer has no choice but to move the funds—or leave the shop. WalletConnect itself openly admits this reality without hiding it.
Up to now, payments were made in a world where the customer accommodated the convenience of the shop. But this time, the arrows turned around—facing the other way.
Second, compliance changed from “after-the-fact” to “built in.” Before a payment goes through, the wallet and the user are matched against the U.S. Treasury OFAC sanctions list, and it’s also checked via IP whether it’s access from a restricted region. The results are returned to the shop’s system, and the final “yes or no” is determined by the shop’s own policy.
Even the data for travel rules that record information about the sender and the recipient can be received in a form that existing management systems can read as-is within the payment flow. For regulated businesses, this is like an entry ticket—turning a currency that they “can’t easily touch, even if they’re interested” into one they can “receive openly.”
Third, the shop doesn’t have to hold crypto assets. If you choose to receive inbound payments in fiat currency, then for the shop owner, TRON’s USDT isn’t “a new currency”—it’s merely that one additional payment method has become available.
The rollout is an integration of the APM (alternative payment methods) approach, which bundles many payment means besides cards. That means you can use the POS and checkout you already have as-is. WalletConnect is adamant that the acceptance cost is lower than the card network.
In short, it’s just like this.
It isn’t that money comes to the shop. The shop goes to where the money is.
Three hundred forty-three years ago, in Suruga-machi—“no markups with cash on hand.”
Now, when you hear this story, there’s one moment that inevitably overlaps in my mind. A commercial revolution that took place in Edo, in Nihonbashi: Mitsui Echigoya’s “no markups with cash on hand.”
Time was the 17th century; the place was Edo. When they say “the business of a textile shop,” it was nothing like the “stores” we picture today. It was a “stall-and-visit commerce,” where merchants carried samples and went around to their regular customers to take orders. Or, they would bring goods to a residence and let the customer choose them there—“house-front sales.” This was the mainstream, and their customers were mainly daimyo, samurai of rank, or merchants from large houses.
Payment was on account. Settlement happened twice a year—once in June and once in December—or once in December once a year. More labor meant higher interest, and prices would rise, leaving the shop’s funds from cycling smoothly. And prices differed from customer to customer; depending on the haggling, they could go up or down. “Markups” were, in essence, the true price plus a surcharge paid after the fact. So back then, customers were made—unknowingly—to pay the “cost of credit” within the price.
It was the first year of Enpō (1673). Takatoshi Mitsui, a merchant from Ise Matsusaka, at the age of 52 opened a textile shop called “Echigoya” in Edo, Honchō 1-chōme. It was a truly modest launch—from a rented property barely half a room wide.
Then, ten years later—Tenna 3 (1683). The shop moves to Suruga-machi just to the south. This is precisely the spot where the current Nihonbashi Mitsukoshi Main Store stands. Here, Takatoshi hoisted proudly the signboard of “no markups with cash on hand.”
Sell at the shopfront. Have them pay cash on the spot. Sell at the same price to everyone. And beyond that—breaking the world’s common sense that says textiles are sold one bolt at a time—the shop started selling only as much as the customer wanted, by the cut.
You don’t have to be invited to a samurai residence. You don’t need the credibility of an account on credit. Townspeople can wander in through the noren at will, buy only what they need with the money they have on hand, for a fixed price. Takatoshi (Kōri) made this “normal” real.
Needless to say, the outcome is something to talk about. “A thousand ryō in the theater, a thousand ryō at the fish market, a thousand ryō at Echigoya.” As a place where a thousand ryō moved in a single day, Echigoya became a thriving shop on par with Kabuki and the fish market.
In the same year, 1683, Takatoshi (Kōri) established a money-changing shop alongside in Suruga-machi. And before long, he opened a business of foreign exchange that connected Edo and Osaka, eventually handling the shogunate’s official exchange as well.
Now, when you put Echigoya and WalletConnect Pay side by side, you’ll see how remarkably they overlap.
First, from “house-front sales” to “shop-front sales.” In the past, fine textiles were for “customers with real credibility.” Even in modern times, payment has long been built on the assumption that people have a “proof of credibility,” such as a bank account or a credit card.
Even without a bank account, life in emerging countries—people who firmly hold USDT. These people, in a sense, were townspeople who didn’t need an invitation to a mansion. For these townspeople, WalletConnect Pay raised the noren at the shopfront.
Second, “no markups” and “the amount is fixed before the signature.” Echigoya drove uncertainty—price haggling—out of commerce. WalletConnect Pay also removed uncertainty from payments: mistakes when typing an address, and having to manually enter the amount.
In both cases, they created a situation where customers can pay “without doubt.”
That’s where the value is.
Third is “cash on hand,” and “a modern markup” in the form of card fees. Just as interest on accounts payable had been baked into the price of textiles back then, today’s shops generally pay credit card merchant fees of a few percent, and those costs inevitably make their way onto the price tags.
Echigoya cut out markups with cash-on-the-spot payments, achieving low prices. WalletConnect Pay, which advertises acceptance costs lower than the card network, simply mirrors that exact structure.
And fourth—this is the most flavorful of all. It’s the incorporation of the money-changing shop. In Edo, it was called “spending gold,” and in Osaka, “spending silver.” Back then in Japan, the currencies used varied depending on the region. The money changers were the ones who filled in that gap.
It’s the same in modern times too. The customer holds TRON’s USDT, and the shop wants the money deposited into a bank account in yen or dollars. WalletConnect Pay quietly absorbs the mismatch between the currency the customer wants to pay and the currency the shop wants to receive—behind the scenes at the settlement layer.
Neither the customer nor the shop needs to think about exchange. Isn’t it precisely like a kimono shop that has a money-changer “built in”?
And if I may add one more thing: taking on the shogunate’s official exchange was the greatest source of credibility for Mitsui. Merchants incorporated into the system “from above” were no longer suspicious newcomers.
WalletConnect Pay—too—has travel-rule capabilities built into all payments, along with checks against the sanctions list. In other words, it has worn “official customs from above” from the very beginning. And with that, it earned the right to do business openly on the main street.
Now, let’s go back to the opening scene. The wallet holds USDT worth ten thousand dollars. In front of you, there’s a single shop.
From now on, all you do is scan the shop’s QR code at the counter, choose TRON’s USDT, confirm the shown amount, and sign. No longer do you need the trouble of rewriting addresses, or the trouble of moving funds to another chain in advance.
Three hundred forty-three years ago, Takatoshi Mitsui created in the streets of Edo a shop where anyone could buy “at a fixed price with the money they already had in hand.” And in the autumn of 2026, the same promise was remade again on the blockchain. The digital-dollar economic ecosystem, with more than 400 million accounts, has begun connecting—through a single line called WalletConnect Pay—to settlements across the world.
No matter the age, the star of commerce is never the shop itself. It’s in the customer’s wallet.
Echigoya proved it in Edo. TRON’s USDT and WalletConnect Pay are trying to prove it on a global scale.
The time has come for a seat at the settlement hall of the Reiwa era. The rest will be explained in the next lecture.