- Offchain and Hyungji struck a strategic partnership to deploy stablecoin payment infrastructure built on Arbitrum across Hyungji’s retail footprint.
- The rollout targets ~2,000 retail locations across South Korea and Singapore, spanning physical and digital storefronts.
- Core business rationale: reduce merchant payment costs (traditional rails cost 2–3% processing fees) and enable faster settlement versus legacy card networks.
- Beyond payments: the partners plan to explore tokenized loyalty/membership rewards and potential DeFi integrations to add programmable customer incentives.
What happened? Offchain — the blockchain infrastructure firm best known for developing Arbitrum — is partnering with South Korea’s Hyungji fashion group to roll out stablecoin payment rails across its 2,000 retail locations in Korea and Singapore. The deployment will reduce card-processing costs and shorten settlement cycles, Hyungji said in a statement shared with AlexaBlockchain .
The deployment is aimed at replacing parts of Hyungji’s card-centric payments stack with onchain settlement on Arbitrum, an Ethereum-based layer-2 network, while also laying the groundwork for tokenized loyalty and membership rewards that can be programmed directly into payments flows.
Offchain Chief Strategy Officer AJ Warner said the partnership shows blockchain infrastructure “moving from theory to practice in everyday commerce,” pointing to “lower costs, faster settlement, and programmable functionality.”
Hyungji Vice Chairman Junho Choi said the retailer chose Arbitrum for “technical performance and ecosystem maturity” needed to serve “millions of customers across thousands of locations,” and framed the shift as a way to reduce payment-rail costs while enabling “next-generation customer experiences,” including programmable rewards and potential DeFi integrations.
Why this matters: from pilots to enterprise-scale payments rails
Stablecoins have existed for years, but the hard part for consumer retail has been operational: integrating wallets at checkout, handling refunds and dispute workflows, meeting compliance obligations, and reconciling onchain records with existing finance systems. A rollout spanning thousands of physical points of sale is a higher bar than the limited “accept crypto here” experiments that have come and gone.
The pitch is straightforward economics. Card acceptance typically carries merchant fees in the low single digits, and industry data show U.S. merchants paid about $187.2 billion in combined credit and debit card “swipe fees” in 2024, underscoring how payment acceptance costs scale with volume.
Hyungji and Offchain are explicitly targeting those structural costs—especially relevant for cross-border retail footprints—while using stablecoins to avoid the price volatility that makes non-pegged crypto impractical for everyday purchases.
Hyungji reported 2024 revenue was KRW301.1 billion (US$209 million).
Stablecoins are becoming mainstream settlement plumbing
What’s changing is less consumer enthusiasm for paying with crypto and more the steady build-out of stablecoin infrastructure by incumbents:
Transaction activity is surging. Total stablecoin transaction volumes rose to $33 trillion in 2025, up 72%, according to Artemis-compiled data. This shows that stablecoins are increasingly used as settlement instruments, not just exchange collateral.
Payments stacks are integrating stablecoins directly. Stripe has expanded stablecoin payment capabilities and also partnered with Shopify to enable USDC payments while letting merchants settle in local currency like any other payment method.
Card networks are moving “onto” stablecoins rather than fighting them. Visa has been formalizing stablecoin settlement and positioning stablecoins as part of next-generation payments infrastructure.
Strategy is shifting at large firms. McKinsey has described 2025 as an “inflection point” where stablecoins could materially reshape payment infrastructure, especially for cross-border flows and always-on settlement.
In that context, Hyungji’s decision reads less like a brand marketing experiment and more like an attempt to re-architect cost and settlement mechanics using blockchain rails—while adding “programmability” (loyalty, offers, conditional rewards) as a differentiator.
Similar real-world stablecoin adoption efforts
Large-scale merchant deployments have increasingly taken the form of stablecoin-to-fiat at checkout (merchant receives local currency; the stablecoin leg is in the background), which lowers merchant friction and regulatory complexity:
In Singapore, crypto exchange OKX launched stablecoin payments accepted at merchants on Grab’s GrabPay platform, with stablecoins converted into a Singapore-dollar stablecoin and merchants receiving Singapore dollars; Reuters also noted Metro, a department store chain, began accepting stablecoin payments.
PayPal has pushed “Pay with Crypto” for merchants, emphasizing cheaper cross-border commerce and routing settlement into fiat or PYUSD, its stablecoin.
Hyungji’s Arbitrum-based approach is closer to an “enterprise rails” buildout (payments plus loyalty tokenization) than a pure wallet acceptance toggle—more akin to a bespoke payments modernization project, but with stablecoins as the settlement unit.
Hyungji’s stablecoin adoption shows that stablecoins are moving beyond remittances and trading platforms into mainstream.
The article “Fashion Group Hyungji Taps Arbitrum for Stablecoin Payments Across 2,000 Retail Locations” was first published on AlexaBlockchain. Read the complete article here: https://alexablockchain.com/hyungji-taps-arbitrum-for-stablecoin-payments/
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