It’s possible that a payments card that allows people to pay with Bitcoin in Australia is just around the corner thanks to Visa.
Is there a Visa Bitcoin payments option on the cards?
According to reporting by the Australian Financial Review, CryptoSpend – a business created by two co-founders of the University of Technology in Sydney – has gotten Visa to approve a physical debit card that will mean people spend Bitcoin in stores on existing payment terminals.
This is a first by a payments giant, allowing a payments card to be issued in Australia enabling cryptocurrencies to be spent in shops, cafes and so on.
The AFR pointed out that Visa and Mastercard seem to want to make it easier to spend Bitcoin on normal items. The masthead reported that both Visa and Mastercard want to facilitate spending cryptocurrencies at millions of merchants around the world. PayPal already allows people to turn bitcoin into normal ‘fiat’ currency at checkouts to pay for things in the US.
This new card is going to issued by the ASX business Novatti Group Ltd (ASX: NOV), with expectations of a launch in September, according to the AFR.
The newspaper quoted one of the CryptoSpend co-founders, Andrew Grech, who said:
“Spending it directly is a more convenient way of selling it. We have a lot of demand for the card. If the market is green, someone could say it’s time to spend some of my profits. On the other side of the fence, another person might say it’s going to keep going up, I’ll hold onto it. But we have seen more spending volume when the price is going up.”
Summary thoughts
This is a very interesting development. One of the best things that will help Bitcoin gain greater adoption is simply by enabling it to be spent in more locations around the world.
After all, it’s meant to be a cryptocurrency not just a digital asset. It’ll be interesting to see how payment cards account for Bitcoin price volatility and the fact these transactions might count as sales of bitcoin.
