From Bentonville to the Blockchain: OnePay’s Upcoming Trading Feature
The American grocery aisle is about to brush up against the bitcoin ledger.
According to people familiar with the matter who spoke with major business media on 3 October 2025, OnePay—the mobile-banking venture majority-owned by Walmart—has quietly begun integrating cryptocurrency trading and custody into its smartphone application.
The feature, slated to launch before year-end, will initially support Bitcoin and Ethereum and will be powered on the back end by Chicago-based infrastructure specialist Zerohash.
If the timetable holds, more than 20 million OnePay account holders could soon see a “Crypto” tab next to debit-card balances, effectively transforming the Walmart-backed app into one of the largest retail on-ramps for digital assets in the United States.
OnePay’s move is neither isolated nor accidental. Over the past four years the company has broadened its toolkit from basic checking to high-yield savings, buy-now-pay-later financing, and even wireless phone plans.
The cryptographic leap, however, marks the firm’s first foray into assets that live entirely outside the traditional banking stack.
By doing so, OnePay positions itself more like Asia’s ubiquitous “super apps,” where payments, investing, social commerce, and daily shopping live behind a single login.
Crucially, the strategy also dovetails with Walmart’s long-running ambition to knit financial services directly into its sprawling retail ecosystem of roughly 4,600 domestic stores and 150 million weekly shoppers.
The Infrastructure Play: Zerohash, Compliance, and Settlement at Scale
Powering the service behind the scenes is Zerohash, a custody and liquidity provider that recently vaulted past a one-billion-dollar valuation on the back of a US$104 million funding round led by Interactive Brokers and Morgan Stanley.
For OnePay, outsourcing the complex plumbing of private-key management, trade execution, and regulatory reporting solves two headaches at once: technological risk and state-by-state licensing. Zerohash’s money-transmitter footprint already blankets nearly every U.S. jurisdiction, allowing OnePay to roll out crypto access nationwide without building an entirely new compliance arm from scratch.
Settlement speed also plays an under-appreciated role.
Unlike many retail investing platforms that batch customer orders and clear them hours later, OnePay is said to target near-instant funding and withdrawals between fiat balances and crypto holdings.
That design is more than a convenience feature; it is the bridge that would let shoppers liquidate small amounts of bitcoin at the register or, conversely, round up spare change from grocery purchases into ether each week.
The interoperability between everyday spending and digital assets could prove to be the differentiator that nudges “crypto-curious” consumers from passive observers to active users.
Competitive and Regulatory Landscape: Is U.S. Retail Finally Ready?
OnePay’s timing lands in the middle of a broad realignment of U.S. attitudes toward digital assets.
The current administration’s softer stance on self-custody wallets—and a legislative push to clarify tax treatment on sub-$200 transactions—has emboldened mainstream financial institutions.
Morgan Stanley is piloting direct crypto access inside its E-Trade unit; PayPal and Venmo have long offered in-app trading; and Cash App’s bitcoin revenues, disclosed in quarterly filings, routinely top a billion dollars.
Against that backdrop, OnePay’s absence of crypto options had begun to look conspicuous, particularly given its high ranking on the Apple and Google app stores.
Still, retail-focused crypto rollouts carry regulatory tripwires. The Securities and Exchange Commission continues to scrutinize staking products and interest-bearing stablecoins, while the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau watches for deceptive marketing around volatile assets.
By limiting its first wave to BTC and ETH—assets regulators have historically treated as commodities—OnePay sidesteps the thorniest classification debates, at least for now.
Insiders hint that additional tokens could follow, but only after monitoring user-behavior data and policy developments in early 2026.
Competitive pressure is mounting, too.
Traditional banks such as JPMorgan Chase have begun embedding tokenized deposit rails for corporate clients, and Apple’s mixed-reality headset is rumored to include NFT wallet features by next spring.
If OnePay succeeds, Walmart stands to capture not only interchange revenue and trading spreads but also invaluable insight into how digital assets influence shopping habits—data that could feed personalized discounts, loyalty programs, and cross-store promotions.
In short, the grocery giant is betting that crypto can be more than a speculative asset class; it can be a flywheel for consumer engagement.
Whether bitcoin at the checkout counter becomes commonplace or remains niche will depend on execution, education, and macro sentiment.
Yet the signal is unmistakable: a Fortune 1 retailer is preparing to put crypto wallets in millions of pockets, blurring the line between Saturday errands and decentralized finance.
The next time a cashier asks, “Debit, credit, or digital asset?” shoppers may have Walmart to thank for the extra choice.
