Japanese e-commerce giant Rakuten launches crypto exchange for trading in bitcoin, ether, and bitcoin cash, via an Android app, with no fees for making trades
Japanese e-commerce giant Rakuten has launched its own exchange for crypto spot trading. — Announced Monday …
Context & Ripple Effects
This launch is the payoff of a four-year build-out: Rakuten put money into Bitcoin payments via its Bitnet investment in 2015, then bought the startup's IP outright and opened a Belfast blockchain lab in 2016 (Bitnet acquisition), before announcing plans to convert its $9B loyalty program into a Rakuten Coin cryptocurrency in 2018.
The exchange turns that R&D pipeline into a live retail product — spot trading in bitcoin, ether, and bitcoin cash through an Android app at zero trading fees. For a group that has since posted 13 straight quarters of operating losses totaling roughly $5.5B on its mobile push, per the related coverage, fee-free crypto is another front in the fight to keep customers inside Rakuten's own payment rails.
First-order effects
- Rakuten's Japanese e-commerce base gets a no-fee on-ramp to bitcoin, ether, and bitcoin cash inside an app they already use, with the exchange positioned as a companion to the loyalty-and-payments stack rather than a standalone brokerage.
Second-order effects
- Incumbent Japanese exchanges that charge trading fees face a deep-pocketed rival willing to run the venue at zero cost to drive ecosystem traffic, pressuring fee schedules across the domestic market.
- The zero-fee model strengthens the case for the planned Rakuten Coin loyalty conversion, since members would have a regulated venue to trade earned tokens rather than just spend them.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, large e-commerce groups treat exchanges as loss-leader infrastructure — monetized through loyalty retention and payments volume rather than commissions — pushing standalone crypto venues toward value-added services to compete.
- The longer arc cuts both ways: the same conglomerate later had to raise ~$1.9B and sell stakes in its banking and securities units after mobile losses, a reminder that platform-side bets like this one are only sustainable while the core funds them.
The trend: E-commerce platforms are absorbing crypto trading into their own apps as a zero-fee loyalty hook, converting exchange infrastructure from a profit center into customer-retention plumbing.