Crypto Payments in the Retail Sector – Cyclebit
Since the number of active crypto wallet users peaked at around 10 million people and fell sharply in 2018, it has been on a steady recovery throughout most of 2019. It’s no secret that many of those users are using their wallets to pay for things. After all, this is the way digital assets were originally designed to be used by Satoshi in the Bitcoin Whitepaper — as peer-to-peer electronic cash.
Many of the business owners, who wish to accept crypto for their products and services, usually do not keep them for long. Some of them liquidate it into fiat right away, while others prefer to wait for more lucrative exchange rates and then sell for fiat as well.
The answer to that question is on the surface: volatility of the price. The historical volatility of the digital assets as a whole steadily grew for the past 6–9 months. This means, that if the merchants were to keep their crypto as is (not sell it right away), their businesses’ economy could be destabilized very quickly. One can not just keep a significant portion of their business revenue in such a volatile asset class.
Just imagine: you, as a business owner, had a great month in October and booked 20% in gross profits from your revenues. Half of the revenues came in crypto, you felt really brave and left it as is, for a couple of months. During that time, the prices on the crypto market fell 40%. Now, all you’re left with for October is break-even. Doesn’t sound like fun, right?
Exactly, for this reason, there is very little of the “peer-to-peer” component left in the retail crypto payments sector. Let’s hope that it’s just for now.
Instead, what companies do is integrate with a third party, like Cyclebit, which can provide them with a service of handling their transactions, liquidating any crypto sent to them straight into local fiat currency, automatically. This way, companies can kill two birds with one stone — enjoy an influx of customers who choose their product or services because they accept crypto, and have little-to-no exposure to the volatility.
There are not many products on the market, capable of providing this kind of service to the merchants. As for now, and for at least a significant part of the oncoming decade, the majority of businesses will prefer fiat as a form of payment and saving profit. And as people will begin to shift more to using crypto for payments, they will need a bridge to safely connect them to the merchants, while providing a great deal of convenience to the latter.
Including more and more crypto into the merchants’ turnover will be quite beneficial for both sides. Experts note that the growing use of crypto for everyday transactions and a growing number of owners will greatly contribute to the stability of digital assets. This, of course, will make it less attractive as a tool for those who plan to use price volatility to earn but make it a much more attractive payment medium. The turning point to look for, as many predict, will be the time when digital assets will be stable enough for merchants to start using digital money in b2b settlements
That is exactly why Cyclebit is here — to provide the infrastructure which makes the payments possible. It eliminates all problems for merchants, from exposure to volatility to cutting down on conversion costs. For the end-user, Cyclebit provides a clear, intuitive interface in the form of POS machine screen and makes the payments so much easier, using only the QR code.
If you and your business are located in any European country with EUR as a currency, or in Canada, Taiwan, Vietnam or Thailand — you can order the POS machines by contacting us via this form. We accept any modern payment method and will enable you to accept crypto, receiving your national fiat currency to the bank account.
Published at Fri, 17 Jan 2020 18:05:25 +0000
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