Learn more: Is Paxos the New Diem? The Stablecoin Issuer’s Facebook Pilot Just Expanded to 2B WhatsApp Customers And Facebook’s WhatsApp messaging app, with two billion users, just announced plans to use smaller stablecoin Paxos as an internal currency. Stablecoin use is likely to continue substantially in 2022 for a number of reasons, most notably that by maintaining a one-to-one peg to the dollar (and other currencies like the euro and pound sterling), they are able to help both consumers and merchants avoid the price volatility of cryptocurrencies like bitcoin and ether, which see daily price moves of 5% to 10% on a regular basis. Pair said that BitPay saw a substantial increase in the use of crypto for luxury goods like jewelry, watches, cars, boats and even gold last year, more than tripling from 9% in 2020 to 21% last year, Pair told Webster. They way consumers are using the altcoins is also interesting. See more: PayPal CEO Schulman: Consumers Moving To Digital Currency In Droves The payments firm allowed customers to trade the three cryptocurrencies and then began accepting them for payment at its 32-million strong merchant network. The use of ether and litecoin was also given a big boost last year when PayPal added support for them, along with bitcoin (BTC) and competitor bitcoin cash, or BCH. Read more: BitPay CEO: Consumers Want To Spend Crypto Wealth At Merchants “There are certainly obvious economies and efficiencies” from a merchant’s cost perspective, he added. BitPay allows merchants to either take the cryptocurrency outright or seamlessly converts it from the crypto the customer is paying with to fiat currency for the merchant at the point of sale. See also: As Crypto Grows, BitPay COO Sees a Moment When FIs Must Lead or Fall BehindīitPay’s volume was up 57% in 2021, with fourth quarter volumes up 27% from Q3, he said.īesides the need to engage and retain customers, merchants who accept cryptocurrencies directly also gain a big benefit by avoiding the high transaction fees charged by credit card companies, Lester said. But if it's crypto, that needs to be part of the equation.” “The merchants and the billers really need to meet the consumers where they are, and if that's a credit card, great. “Consumer choice drives the boss and them wanting to have an omnichannel approach to payments,” BitPay COO Jim Lester told PYMNTS Karen Webster in a recent interview. The $69 million NFT collage sold at auction by Christie’s last year was priced in ether, for example. Most of those live on the Ethereum blockchain, and their transactions are made with ether. That said, the use of ether, the cryptocurrency of the Ethereum blockchain, has grown dramatically since it gained a higher profile in 2021 with the boom in decentralized finance, or DeFi, and NFT projects. He attributed the gain partly to the growing use of stablecoins for business-to-business payments across international borders. That’s down from 92% bitcoin in 2020, BitPay Chief Executive Officer Stephen Pair said. The remaining 3% comes from a trio of smaller cryptocurrencies BitPay began supporting in 2021: early bitcoin competitor litecoin (LTC), Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s favorite dogecoin, or DOGE, and its spinoff shiba inu, or SHIB. Stablecoins like tether, or USDT, and Circle’s USD Coin, also known as USDC, are closing fast, representing 13% of the payments run through BitPay, Bloomberg reported. Nearly one third of the payments processed by crypto-focused BitPay are made with ether, stablecoins and a handful of smaller, so-called altcoins.Įther now accounts for 15% of the payments made on BitPay, which provides technology to allow merchants to accept cryptocurrencies at the point of sale, as well as a Mastercard-branded debit card that lets consumers spend a number of cryptocurrencies at millions of retailers. As merchants and consumers become more familiar with cryptocurrencies and the number of ways to use them commercially expands, bitcoin is losing its dominance as the payment coin of choice.
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