Whitepay Introduces Crypto Payments to Ukraine’s Tech Stores

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Commenting on the roll out, Crypto.com’s Asia & Pacific General Manager Karl Mohan tipped the adoption of an AUD-backed stablecoin as being the catalyst to make crypto payments mainstream in Australia.

Convenience store and petrol station brand On The Run (OTR) has launched crypto payment support across all 175 of its petrol stations and convenience stores across Victoria, South Australia (SA), and Western Australia (WA) as of Aug. 18.

As previously reported, the move is part of a collaboration between OTR, Singapore-based exchange Crypto.com, and DataMesh, a Sydney-based payment systems provider.

The exchange has provided its Pay Merchant service as a payment settlement layer, while Datamesh has provided the point of sale terminals.

Speaking with Cointelegraph, Crypto.com’s Asia & Pacific General Manager Karl Mohan noted that it only took “eight weeks to from the time of proof of concept to the point of actually getting a full scalable production-ready environment.”

Mohan noted that while 175 OTR stores have initially been outfitted with the infrastructure, the crypto payments service is operationally ready to scale much further.

“What happens now is any merchant, whether you're a cafe owner or someone who runs thousands of stores, could just plug and play,” he said.

Adding to the 175 stores, OTR’s parent company Peregrine Corp intends to roll out the crypto payments service to another 250 retail sites across the country such as Subway, Oporto, and Krispy Kreme.

Mohan also stated that Crypto.com charges zero fees on the transactions in this context, however, there will be fees on the merchant’s end, which will set their own rates. Such may suggest that transaction costs could be similar to that of card payments with fiat.

Questioned on what is needed to make crypto payments widely adopted in Australia, especially given the tax obligations of paying with crypto assets, Mohan opined that the utilization of an AUD-backed stable could be the key:

“So of course, Bitcoin and Ethereum because of their market capitalization are already on the top of the list. But an overwhelming number of consumers have said they are ready to accept and actually start paying with Australian stablecoins.”

“We've made the system available and if you've seen ANZ announce the Australian dollar stablecoin, and we see these types of stablecoins becoming available, I really believe that it will become mainstream,” he added.

So far the ANZ bank has pilot tested its A$DC stablecoin purely for private institutional purposes, but if it eventually does get opened up to the retail market, Mohan stated that “we would love the opportunity to work with any financial or any Australian deposit-taking institution that is keen to introduce a stablecoin.”

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Bitcoin Payments

“It's a vision that has been, I think, forgotten a little bit and I think one of the reasons why it has been forgotten is basically because it got priced out of the market,” Vitalik Buterin said.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has argued that crypto payments will once again “make sense” as transaction costs will soon fall to fractions of a cent due to layer-2 rollups.

The Cointelegraph team currently on the ground at Korea Blockchain Week (KBW) quoted Buterin as stating that the final hurdle to getting transactions down to fractions of a cent at scale is blockchain data compression.

He pointed to “solid work happening” with roll-ups at the moment such as Optimism’s layer-2 scaling solution for Ethereum, which has worked to get the size and cost of data in blockchain transactions down by introducing zero byte compression.

“So today with roll ups, transaction fees are generally somewhere between $0.25, sometimes $0.10, and in the future with roll ups with all of the improvements to efficiency that I talked about. The transaction costs could go down to $0.05, or even maybe as low as $0.02. So much cheaper, much more affordable, and a complete game changer.”

Despite primarily functioning as a speculative store of value, Buterin emphasized the key use case of Bitcoin (BTC) presented in its white paper from 2008 was to provide a “peer-to-peer electronic cash system” that was cheaper than traditional payment methods.

However, while that was true up until 2013 according to Buterin, this became no longer the case in 2018 when adoption increased and blockchain transactions became too expensive.

“It's a vision that has been, I think, forgotten a little bit and I think one of the reasons why it has been forgotten is basically because it got priced out of the market,” he said.

In the Ethereum co-founder’s view, BTC and other assets will soon be able to provide this use case once again as scaling solutions — such as the lightning network in the case of BTC — gradually bring the costs down to fractions of a cent.

Crypto payment use cases

Buterin outlined a couple of different areas that cheap crypto transaction will be particularly important. Firstly he pointed to “lower income countries or places where the existing financial system is not very effective,” as it will give citizens access to vital payments structure over the internet, something which is already adopted despite the cost for international remittances.

Secondly, he noted that in the context of Ethereum, cheap crypto transactions will also help ramp up adoption for non-financial applications such as domain name system (DNS) servers, humanity proof of attendance protocols and Web3 account management services.

“You need to actually send a transaction to create a DNS name, you need to actually send the transaction to recover your account, you need to actually send a transaction to meet some of these adaptations. If doing each of those operations costs like $11, then people are not going into it.”

“Scalability isn't just like some boring thing where you just need like cost numbers go down scalability, I think actually enables and unlocks entirely new classes of applications,” he added.

Gucci becomes first major brand to accept ApeCoin payments

August 3, 2022 Coin Telegraph

apecoin

Gucci has ramped up its Web3 initiatives by allowing crypto nerds to purchase its products with ApeCoin in its stores, adding to a list of 12 other digital assets it accepts for payment.

Italian high-end fashion giant Gucci has become the first major brand to accept payments in the Bored Ape Yacht Club affiliated ApeCoin (APE).

The move was announced on August 1 and could provide the ApeCoin project with significant mainstream exposure along with bringing further utility to the cryptocurrency.

Gucci customers in the United States (U.S.) will now be able to purchase items in-store with APE, while the payment infrastructure will be provided by BitPay, a firm that has helped big names such as AMC Theaters accept crypto payments in the past.

Excited to announce that @Gucci will become the first major brand to allow customers to pay for purchases in-store with ApeCoin, via @BitPay. https://t.co/ipoeW6lXLl
— ApeCoin (@apecoin) August 2, 2022

Despite the ongoing crypto bear market, the fashion brand has taken a serious plunge into the crypto sector this year.

In February, Gucci kicked things off with the “SUPERGUCCI” NFT collection in collaboration with X toy brand SUPERPLASTIC. The following month, Gucci then rolled out the “Gucci Grail” NFT collection that was targeted toward owners of top NFT projects such as the BAYC.

In May, the firm then went on to announce plans to accept 12 crypto assets as payment methods across 111 stores in North America. The list included Bitcoin (BTC), Bitcoin Cash (BCH), Ether (ETH), Wrapped Bitcoin (wBTC), Litecoin (LTC), Shiba Inu (SHIB), Dogecoin (DOGE), and five U.S. dollar stablecoins.

BAYC collectors seem to have shown strong support for Gucci’s crypto moves so far, with @NBATopShotEast claiming to be the first person to pay for Gucci items in ETH at the brand's Wooster location in New York City in July. While another two BAYC members claimed to be the second and third people to do so.

In response to the latest APE announcement, @NBATopShotEast outlined plans to once again be the first person to use the asset in the Wooster Gucci store.

Lucky to be Guccis first ever in store crypto user... hope to be the first in store Apecoin user too https://t.co/mNdG9oSJPi
— NBA Top Shot East Coast Podcast (@NBATopShotEast) August 2, 2022

The Apecoin community

APE was launched to much anticipation earlier this year in March. Its accompanying decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) and governance community has since remained highly engaged and has overseen important decisions such as the vetoing of a proposal to port APE from Ethereum to a new blockchain in June.

Last month, the DAO voted in favor of several notable proposals such as studying the feasibility to host an NFT conference and festival and providing APE funding for the BoredApeGazette to become a 24-hour news site. While the project is working on rolling out APE staking in response to a strong push from the community.

ApeCoin fam - we hear you on staking. It’s important and something we want to get right. We’re currently finalizing details that will serve as the basis for a wider update on our progress in line with AIPs-21&22. Expect more frequent updates and collaboration soon. pic.twitter.com/jKi8fZuaqd
— ApeCoin (@apecoin) July 22, 2022

At the time of writing APE is priced at $6.74 after pumping 11.4% over the past seven days. APE has shown a strong resurgence of late, due in part to positive developments in the affiliated Otherside Metaverse project, with the price increasing by 49.1% over the past month.

Its current market cap of roughly $2.06 billion makes APE the thirty-third largest asset in crypto, however, APE is still down 74.8% from its all-time high of $26.70 on April 28.

crypto payments