Though many are acting as if the crypto winter has left the cryptocurrency space a barren, snow-covered wasteland, there are signs of life sprouting up everywhere.
One such sign of life is in a report titled “Paying With Cryptocurrency,” a collaboration between data platform PYMNTS and Bitpay. The researchers noted that among businesses with an annual income of $1 billion, 85% are adopting crypto payments. Additionally, 82% of all the merchants who participated in the survey cited crypto’s elimination of middlemen as their primary reason for accepting it as a payment method.
Most payment options have fees in the range of 1.5-3.5%. Crypto fees are noticeably lower — around 1%. The report also cited that the biggest obstacle to adopting crypto payments was technical barriers. 68% of the merchants that do not yet accept crypto indicated that implementing the technology was the major hurdle.
This is fantastic news for investors, as technical hurdles will inevitably be sorted with time. Cryptocurrency payment options are also useful to smaller companies. Igneus Terrenus, a policy advocate for crypto exchange Bybit said that Bitcoin over the Lightning Network is easily superior to running a credit card. “Bitcoin on Lightning is disintermediated, has finality built into it, faster, more secure, and is many magnitudes cheaper in transaction cost than credit card’s ~3% fee. The payment does not necessarily need to be settled in BTC since the Bitcoin network can take dollars, convert them to BTC and transfer it across the network and convert it back to dollars upon arrival.”
Kene Ezeji-Okoye, co-founder and president of Millicent, agreed. “Goods and services are generally priced in fiat, and when accepting crypto, merchants simply end up with the fiat value of the crypto at the exact time of purchase less the gateway’s fees. This can be a better deal than the fees charged by card networks or PayPal, so it makes sense for some merchants to add this option.”
Investors curious about the intersection of Blockchain technology and Finance can explore ETFs like the Invesco Alerian Galaxy Crypto Economy ETF (SATO) and the Invesco Alerian Galaxy Blockchain Users and Decentralized Commerce ETF (BLKC).
For more news, information, and strategy, visit the Crypto Channel.
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