“I think more and more companies are going to prefer it as a payment method,” he said. Fee avoidance also applies to merchants now paying Visa and Mastercard a big chunk off the top of every sale. That’s a use case Pair says he hears “over and over again” at BitPay. Paying a contract worker in Europe a few thousand dollars can rack up fees of more than $100 and there are other fees banks impose. “If you are in a part of the world that isn’t well served by the banking system you can now pay for things using cryptocurrency - you just set up a wallet and you load it, do some work and get paid in crypto, and then you’re able to spend it right away.” “There are a lot of benefits depending on who you are and where you are,” he noted. I think there’s a lot of opportunity to innovate.”īlockchain offers possibilities that were not conceivable in the past, Pair said. Some of the older check-free, bank-based bill payment services are pretty antiquated and not very engaging. You might give somebody your credit card and they bill it every month, but you don’t have a lot of control over that. “There’s not really a lot of great bill payment solutions out there. See also: Nearly 60 Percent of Consumers Want To Buy Stuff With Crypto ![]() Right now, Pair admitted, there’s “not a whole lot.” But where pessimists see a long, uphill battle for mainstream acceptance, he sees a marketplace ripe for reinvention - the potential to transform everyday tasks like paying bills by bypassing legacy infrastructure. Still, getting to that point requires more use cases to give consumers a reason why they should switch to using bitcoin to buy things instead of using a credit card or services like PayPal or Venmo. “There could be an inflection point in 2022 where it becomes more ubiquitous - where it starts to become a little unusual for you to not have some crypto and to have tried it out and maybe bought a little with it.” “I think it’s just a matter of time until it gets to a point where it’s both easy and there’s a compelling reason” to use crypto at the point of sale, Pair said. ![]() At that point, the merchants can decide to sell it themselves or hold onto it. In addition, a small but growing number of companies are using services from BitPay and its competitors that let customers pay directly with bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. Right now, most people who spend crypto do so using a Visa- or Mastercard-branded debit card issued by a cryptocurrency payments provider or exchange, which works at the point of sale by selling the crypto on your card and transferring cash to the merchant instantly behind the scenes. Of course, that can only happen if people have a place to spend their crypto - an increasingly easy proposition. “There’s going to be many more places with that service - that you’ll be able to spend crypto and do it in an in-person setting, which may make people more comfortable trying it out than perhaps if it’s on a website where they’re not sure if they’re doing it right or wrong.” “I think in 2022, you’ll see many more people - that next wave of people - getting interested in crypto both from an investment perspective and a ‘let’s try it for a payment’ ,” he said. See more: Cryptocurrency Payments Report: How Consumers Want to Use It to Shop and Pay And PYMNTS’ May 2021 Cryptocurrency Payments Report found another 17% already planned to dip their toe into crypto by the end of the second quarter of 2022. The prediction, made in a conversation with PYMNTS’ Karen Webster, dovetails with research showing that 14% to 15% of the American public owns or owned crypto - the vast majority of them bitcoin, but increasingly Ethereum’s ether tokens. So says Stephen Pair, CEO of crypto payments processor BitPay. Last year, people started learning about and buying Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.
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