WhatsApp has a payments feature in India and Brazil that allows users to easily send or receive money using the messaging service. It was recently spotted that WhatsApp is working on bringing its payment feature to the United States with Novi integration, a digital wallet owned by Meta. The feature is now official, with a limited rollout of Novi wallet in WhatsApp going live in the US.

The announcement was made by Novi lead David Marcus on Twitter (via WABetaInfo). Unlike WhatsApp Pay in India, which relies on the UPI (Unified Payment Interface) to send and receive INR (Indian Rupee), Novi allows users in the US to send and receive Pax Dollar (USPD), a stable cryptocurrency, whose value is linked to the US dollar. So, when a user sends you money using Novi over WhatsApp, you actually receive USDP, which you can withdraw to your bank account for an equivalent value in US dollars.

You'll be able to use Novi to send or receive money on WhatsApp without incurring any fees and there's no limitation on the number of times you can transfer funds to your bank account. The addition of the Novi wallet does not change how WhatsApp works, nor does it affect the end-to-end encryption of your messages. For now, the pilot program is only live in the US, but Novi and WhatsApp will be looking to bring this integration to other countries based on the initial feedback they receive.

WhatsApp has faced a lot of regulatory hurdles in expanding WhatsApp Pay in India and Brazil. A year after the service went live, the payment feature still has a ceiling of 40 million users in India. In Brazil, WhatsApp Pay was suspended just a week after its 2020 launch, and it took Facebook a year to reach an agreement with the authorities and roll out the feature. It remains to be seen if it will run into any such issues in the US.