On August 19, PayPal’s official account posted that users could use the PayPal app to scan WeChat payment QR codes at merchants in mainland China. Someone in the comments asked: PayPal already supports PYUSD—could this WeChat Pay partnership allow payments directly in PYUSD?

The comment received no official response, but it landed squarely on the answer everyone bullish on stablecoins has been waiting for: if a player the size of PayPal can give stablecoins access to China’s offline merchant-acquiring network, their range of use cases would expand dramatically. Three weeks later, another company did take a step in that direction.

Two Answers

In May this year, Tencent’s cross-border payments platform TenPay Global connected with PayPal World, PayPal’s cross-border wallet platform. U.S. PayPal users can directly use the app to scan WeChat Pay QR codes at merchants in mainland China, without downloading WeChat or opening a Chinese bank account. Merchants receive renminbi, while PayPal accounts are debited in local currency through conventional correspondent-bank and foreign-exchange conversion channels.

When reporting on it, U.S. crypto outlet Decrypt quoted PayPal as saying that the World platform does not rely on blockchain or tokenized assets; it merely replicates some stablecoin-like capabilities in the user experience, such as faster settlement and currency conversion. In other words, PayPal did not use the stablecoin it issues this time.

Around September 12, a second answer appeared. Dubai-headquartered cryptocurrency exchange Bybit launched a page on its website reading “Bybit Pay x WeChat Pay (Beta)”: eligible users can scan WeChat Pay QR codes at merchants in mainland China and pay directly with crypto assets held in their accounts. This time, it really is using crypto—not a stablecoin substitute.

But mainland China has long been listed among the excluded jurisdictions in Bybit’s restricted-regions list, and account registration and identity verification are not open to mainland residents. The page refers to where merchants are located, not where users can open accounts and use the service. The people who can actually use this beta are overseas users whose accounts are registered in supported regions, who already hold crypto assets, and who happen to be spending in mainland China—for example, foreign tourists or Chinese people living abroad who hold crypto.

One Step Short

Bybit’s move may look sudden, but it has really formalized a path that already existed.

Before this, many people who have long held accounts at overseas exchanges and regularly travel to and from mainland China had already been using another method to spend crypto through WeChat Pay and Alipay: apply for a U.S.-dollar prepaid card issued by an exchange, convert USDT into dollars and load it onto the card, then link the card to WeChat or Alipay for spending. This route passes through Mastercard or Visa’s clearing networks, and foreign exchange fees plus crypto-conversion fees together consume roughly 1.9%. The card networks serve as a layer of conversion between crypto assets and WeChat’s merchant-acquiring network—and collect a toll along the way.

At least at the layer users can perceive, Bybit Pay’s QR Pay removes the card-spending step: there is no need to first convert crypto into dollars loaded onto a card; users can pay directly by scanning a code. As for how the payment is actually settled to WeChat Pay’s merchant-acquiring system in the background whether through banking channels or other clearing arrangements the company has not disclosed the details.

What Bybit can do now is only the smallest slice of this route: users whose accounts are registered in supported regions and who have arrived in mainland China to spend can try a new settlement method. If this path can run reliably, the next issues are scope: whether service regions can expand, merchant coverage can deepen, and review processes can be standardized. These are not technical problems; they depend on progress in licensing and regulatory communication. If an exchange can truly settle crypto assets into one of the world’s largest mobile-payment merchant networks, even through only a small opening for now, it shows that the path itself is viable. Whichever player can first smooth out the two hurdles of approvals and regional restrictions can turn Bybit’s currently cramped beta path into a replicable template.

The real suspense is whether the next entrant squeezing through this gap will be another cryptocurrency exchange, or the card networks that this path originally bypasses, finding their own way back in.

  • This article is for reference only and does not constitute investment advice. Markets involve risk; invest with caution.