Forget about waiting for your local cafe or grocery store to accept Bitcoin. Every store in Australia with an EFTPOS terminal can now accept the digital currency thanks to CoinJar.
This leading Aussie Bitcoin start-up announced the general release of CoinJar Swipe, the only Bitcoin EFTPOS card, at the recent Payment Innovations 2015 Conference in Sydney.
With CoinJar Swipe now available to the general public, you can now use Bitcoin to pay for goods wherever there is an EFTPOS terminal in Australia. Now that’s a game changer…
Cardholders can also instantly access their Bitcoin wherever they are, rather than waiting days for a bank to clear a funds transfer into Australian dollars.
Where are people spending their Bitcoin?
This general release follows the successful trial of the card among select CoinJar DNA users beginning in September last year. Over the past five months, 61 CoinJar Swipe holders have used their EFTPOS cards to make nearly $30,000 worth of transactions.
Nearly two-thirds (59 per cent) of these transactions have been everyday goods – food, drinks and groceries at cafes, bars, supermarkets and variety stories – just simple normal stuff.
This exemplifies and highlights the simplicity of using digital currency to make everyday purchases without the hassle and fees associated with traditional payment methods.
Prashan Paramanathan, CEO of charity crowdfunding platform Chuffed, shared his experience with this first-of-its-kind card saying, “With Swipe, I can now use Bitcoin to buy just about anything. The other day, I went out to the local Woolies and bought my lunch with Bitcoin.”
“Really, at the end of the day, I want to do everything that I already do with other currency, plus more with Bitcoin,” he remarked.
What makes the CoinJar Swipe relevant today?
“Bitcoin holders want to use their digital currency for more than just trading or peer-to-peer transfers,” Samuel Tate, Marketing Lead at CoinJar pointed out. “People are already using their cards daily to pull out cash or make everyday purchases”
“We’re working to make Bitcoin a stable and more useful digital currency for everyone, and we believe the release of CoinJar Swipe is one of the missing pieces to that puzzle.”
“Digital currency is the future, but to make it useful right now it has to tap into the existing banking infrastructure. That’s why something like CoinJar Swipe is so important,” he explained.
Combined with the recent release of its revamped iOS app and the Hedged Accounts feature, CoinJar is making Bitcoin more useful for everyday people, not just speculative traders.
Hedged Accounts allows users to peg the price of Bitcoin against the fiat currency of their choice — Australian Dollars, US Dollars, Great British Pounds or the Euro.
With Hedged Accounts, if a user, for example, holds $A400 worth of Bitcoins today, they will be able to access $A400 worth of Bitcoins in the future, regardless of whatever price fluctuations occur.
CoinJar, which is backed by leading investors AngelCube and Blackbird Ventures, now has more than 40,000 customers and has processed more than $A50 million in transactions in the past 12 months.