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. ![]() Only the latter company has one of the biggest portfolios in the space with companies like Grayscale, Abra, Genesis, BitPay, and others.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. Because some rounds involve participation from multiple investors, it is unclear how much each company invested in a project.Īs seen below, Alphabet has invested in Fireblocks, Dapper Labs, Vultage, and Digital Currency Group. The 40 companies invested approximately $6B into blockchain startups between September 2021 and June 2022. The report claims the following about the total number of companies that received funding from Google, BlackRock, Samsung, Goldman Sachs, and other financial behemoths: The report used data from CB Insights to get a pulse on the companies being supported by these major corporations. As a proxy of this, we can look at the total funding amounts of the rounds they participated in. (…) we cannot determine how much money these corporations have invested, as they participate in funding rounds with multiple or many other investors. However, they used other methods to come up with approximate: The money flows via private funding rounds and other investment mechanisms. The report claims that the amount invested by Alphabet and other companies is hard to track.
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