As the dominant force in global retail, Walmart is making a major move into crypto assets. OnePay, the fintech payment app owned by the retailer, is allegedly going to roll out cryptocurrency trading and custody by the end of 2025. The implementation will let OnePay’s 1.5 million users easily buy, hold and convert Bitcoin (BTC) and Ether (ETH) right in the app they already use. This signals a strong new chapter in the mainstream movement of crypto, moving crypto assets from specialized trading platforms to key functionality in common day-to-day financial tools.
From Shopping Carts to Digital Wallets
As per sources with knowledge of the matter, OnePay is set to become a one-stop shop for its customers’ financial needs. The new cryptocurrency products will be powered by Zerohash, a blockchain infrastructure organization based in Chicago with a focus on assisting fintech companies access digital assets and blockchain technology. By providing the two largest and most well-known cryptocurrencies – Bitcoin and Ether – OnePay is methodically entering the cryptocurrency market. The goal is to provide an easy to navigate and trusted opportunity for retail consumers to purchase cryptocurrency, even if they possess little knowledge of dedicated crypto exchanges. For millions of Walmart shoppers and customers of the service, the entry into cryptocurrency could be just a few taps away from their checking account balance.
A New Challenger in the FinTech Crypto Race
With this latest move, OnePay is entering a very competitive arena. They will be going against well-established fintech players, such as PayPal, Venmo, and Square’s Cash App, which already support crypto trading and have developed significant user engagement around this feature.
However, OnePay has a powerful ace in its pocket: a direct link with Walmart. It can put financial services into one of the shopping experiences of the largest retailers, possibly creating a unique brand of powerful ecosystem. This essentially makes OnePay more than just another payment app, but potentially a main financial hub for a large consumer base.
The Great “Embedding” of Crypto Trading
OnePay’s effort is one piece of a much larger industry movement: the “great embedding” of crypto service. Users have had to sign up for an exchange like Coinbase or Binance just to purchase cryptocurrency for years. That era is nearing an end.
The capacity to exchange digital assets is quickly becoming a baseline feature of the payment and banking application methods that users are already using in their everyday lives. This change plays a significant role in the formula for mass adoption, as it reduces the barrier to entry for users considerably. The act of investing in cryptocurrency is about to become less of a stand-alone, complex activity and more like one of the other functions you can perform with an app – like reimbursing your friend for dinner or checking your account balance to facilitate a bill payment.
Seamless Fiat Integration: The Key to Mass Adoption
The main attraction of this new model is straightforwardness. What apps, like OnePay, are producing is really the novelty of connecting to traditional fiat currency. It’s intimidating for the average user to create an account on a crypto exchange, understand trading pairs, and manage how it all works with a wallet transfer.
By offering trading directly in the app, they erase that friction. You can immediately convert dollars from your linked bank account to Bitcoin and back again all in the app. It is very simple and familiar. This point is widely accepted as the path to the next set of retail crypto acceptance.
Tapping into a Trillion-Dollar Payments Pie
In the end, Walmart’s action is a tactical move to grab a share of the huge global payments market, which is estimated to generate $2.4 trillion in fees each year. Transitioning from a payment instrument to a multi-faceted digital finance platform with cryptocurrency generates a stickier, more flexible, and valuable platform for its end-users. As the lines continue to merge between retail, banking, and investing, Walmart is signaling that it wants to be a major player in the money of tomorrow.
