Avolta, the world's leading travel retailer, has launched a pilot at Zurich Airport's Level 2 duty-free store allowing passengers to pay with USDC, a stablecoin pegged to the US dollar. The initiative, developed and implemented by Hamburg-based DevelopX, marks one of the first instances a major airport retailer has accepted stablecoin payments at a physical point-of-sale terminal during live transactions.
Customers complete purchases by scanning a QR code at the register, confirming the payment through their digital wallet, and receiving near-instant settlement. Funds move directly from the customer's wallet to the merchant over the Base blockchain, with no card network, acquiring bank, or payment service provider acting as an intermediary.
Christian Heeg, a partner at DevelopX, said the project's focus shifted after initial technical feasibility was confirmed. "The question is no longer whether a stablecoin payment works technically. The question is whether it can hold up on a Friday evening in duty-free — with shift changes, returns, and everything that comes with it," Heeg said. "We are testing whether stablecoins can become a genuine digital alternative to cash at the POS. To the customer, paying ultimately looks almost boring. That was the goal."
Before launch, regulators and technology teams reviewed the system and ran end-to-end tests before permitting real customers to use the checkout. Compliance checks run transparently in the background.
DevelopX emphasized two structural advantages of the model. Travelers avoid the foreign-exchange and overseas surcharges commonly levied by credit-card networks. Merchants see settlement shift from days to minutes, with revenue landing in their accounts shortly after a sale rather than waiting for traditional clearing cycles.
Avolta operates roughly 5,100 sales outlets across nearly 1,000 locations in more than 70 countries, running integrated retail and food-and-beverage services at airports, motorway service areas, cruise ships, ferries, rail stations and other high-traffic travel venues. DevelopX, a digital consulting and software engineering firm with around 300 employees in Germany, Portugal and Poland, designs and operates digital payment infrastructure but does not act as a payment-service provider itself; its systems run on the client's own infrastructure.
The pilot is framed as an experiment in whether alternative payment rails can materially improve the travel experience rather than a definitive rollout decision. Whether similar deployments expand remains to be seen.
