PANews reported on April 15th, citing CoinDesk, that Japanese e-commerce giant Rakuten will open XRP payment functionality to its 44 million users, allowing them to use XRP for payments at over 5 million Japanese merchants through the Rakuten Pay app. Rakuten will also allow users to conduct spot XRP trading within the app, purchasing XRP with Rakuten Points and depositing it into Rakuten Wallet. A senior manager for ecosystem development at Ripple stated that this move integrates XRP into one of Japan's largest points systems, with over 3 trillion points (approximately $23 billion) in circulation now convertible to XRP. Rakuten already supports payments using Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Bitcoin Cash.