Tencent’s latest solution simplifies cross-border payments for Weixin users and merchants.
Updated
January 8, 2026 6:33 PM

Tencent's large penguin statue in front of a building. PHOTO: UNSPLASH
In a world where digital borders are fading faster than ever, Tencent is betting on familiarity. With the launch of TenPay Global Checkout, the company wants to make paying across countries feel as seamless as paying at home.
The new service, unveiled today, allows Weixin Mini Program merchants outside mainland China to accept a variety of local payment methods. That includes digital wallets, real-time payment networks and credit and debit cards, all through a single integration. The launch starts in Singapore and Macao SAR, where merchants can now take payments via PayNow, BOCPAY(MO), and major cards. Japan, Australia and New Zealand are next, with more regions to follow soon.
This rollout builds on the growing reach of Weixin Mini Programs, known internationally through WeChat. These small apps are built right into the platform, letting users' shop, book services and make payments without downloading separate apps. Today, there are over one million monthly active users in key overseas markets, with Mini Programs available across 92 countries and regions.
Yet, for many users abroad, paying within Mini Programs hasn’t always been simple. Foreign card restrictions, currency conversions and limited local options often made checkout a frustrating step. TenPay Global Checkout aims to change that.
“TenPay Global Checkout marks an important step in enhancing the local consumer experience. By enabling overseas Weixin Mini Program merchants to accept trusted and diversified local payment methods through one unified solution, users benefit from a more convenient and efficient payment experience. This helps merchants improve payment conversion rates, expand their user base and scale their businesses to serve a broader range of customers”, said Wenhui Yang, CEO of TenPay Global (Singapore).
What makes this move interesting isn’t just its technical simplicity—it’s the cultural bridge it builds. For users in Singapore or Japan, paying with PayNow or a local card inside Weixin feels less like an international transaction and more like an everyday purchase.
For merchants, it’s an invitation into a market that values convenience and trust. Payment familiarity, after all, often decides whether a user completes a purchase or abandons it at checkout.
The company remains focused on creating secure, connected and user-friendly payment experiences that help merchants grow and allow consumers to pay with confidence, wherever they are.
If successful, TenPay Global Checkout could quietly redefine how cross-border commerce feels—not like a transaction across regions, but a familiar tap, scan or click. In an increasingly global marketplace, that kind of familiarity might just be the next frontier in digital trust.
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A closer look at the tech, AI, and open ecosystem behind Tien Kung 3.0’s real-world push
Updated
February 18, 2026 8:03 PM

Humanoid robots working in a warehouse. PHOTO: ADOBE STOCK
Humanoid robotics has advanced quickly in recent years. Machines can now walk, balance, and interact with their surroundings in ways that once seemed out of reach. Yet most deployments remain limited. Many robots perform well in controlled settings but struggle in real-world environments. Integration is often complex, hardware interfaces are closed, software tools are fragmented, and scaling across industries remains difficult.
Against this backdrop, X-Humanoid has introduced its latest general-purpose platform, Embodied Tien Kung 3.0. The company positions it not simply as another humanoid robot, but as a system designed to address the practical barriers that have slowed adoption, with a focus on openness and usability.
At the hardware level, Embodied Tien Kung 3.0 is built for mobility, strength, and stability. It is equipped with high-torque integrated joints that provide strong limb force for high-load applications. The company says it is the first full-size humanoid robot to achieve whole-body, high-dynamic motion control integrated with tactile interaction. In practice, this means the robot is designed to maintain balance and execute dynamic movements even in uneven or cluttered environments. It can clear one-meter obstacles, perform consecutive high-dynamic maneuvers, and carry out actions such as kneeling, bending, and turning with coordinated whole-body control.
Precision is also a focus. Through multi-degree-of-freedom limb coordination and calibrated joint linkage, the system is designed to achieve millimeter-level operational accuracy. This level of control is intended to support industrial-grade tasks that require consistent performance and minimal error across changing conditions.
But hardware is only part of the equation. The company pairs the robot with its proprietary Wise KaiWu general-purpose embodied AI platform. This system supports perception, reasoning, and real-time control through what the company describes as a coordinated “brain–cerebellum” architecture. It establishes a continuous perception–decision–execution loop, allowing the robot to operate with greater autonomy and reduced reliance on remote control.
For higher-level cognition, Wise KaiWu incorporates components such as a world model and vision-language models (VLM) to interpret visual scenes, understand language instructions, and break complex objectives into structured steps. For real-time execution, a vision-language-action (VLA) model and full autonomous navigation system manage obstacle avoidance and precise motion under variable conditions. The platform also supports multi-agent collaboration, enabling cross-platform compatibility, asynchronous task coordination, and centralized scheduling across multiple robots.
A central part of the platform is openness. The company states that the system is designed to address compatibility and adaptation challenges across both development and deployment layers. On the hardware side, Embodied Tien Kung 3.0 includes multiple expansion interfaces that support different end-effectors and tools, allowing faster adaptation to industrial manufacturing, specialized operations, and commercial service scenarios. On the software side, the Wise KaiWu ecosystem provides documentation, toolchains, and a low-code development environment. It supports widely adopted communication standards, including ROS2, MQTT, and TCP/IP, enabling partners to customize applications without rebuilding core systems.
The company also highlights its open-source approach. X-Humanoid has open-sourced key components from the Embodied Tien Kung and Wise KaiWu platforms, including the robot body architecture, motion control framework, world model, embodied VLM and cross-ontology VLA models, training toolchains, the RoboMIND dataset, and the ArtVIP simulation asset library. By opening access to these elements, the company aims to reduce development costs, lower technical barriers, and encourage broader participation from researchers, universities, and enterprises.
Embodied Tien Kung 3.0 enters a market where technical progress is visible but large-scale adoption remains uneven. The gap is not only about movement or strength. It is about integration, interoperability, and the ability to operate reliably and autonomously in everyday industrial and commercial settings. If platforms can reduce fragmentation and simplify deployment, humanoid robots may move beyond demonstrations and into sustained commercial use.
In that sense, the significance of Embodied Tien Kung 3.0 lies less in isolated technical claims and more in how its high-dynamic hardware, embodied AI system, open interfaces, and collaborative architecture are structured to work together. Whether that integrated approach can close the deployment gap will shape how quickly humanoid robotics becomes part of real-world operations.