An under the radar thing is taking place… major companies are accepting crypto in their retail stores through an app called Spedn. Companies like Barnes & Noble, Baskin Robbins, Bed Bath & Beyond, Caribou Coffee, Crate and Barrel, Express, GameStop, Jamba Juice, Lowe’s, Nordstrom, Office Depot & OfficeMax, Petco, Regal Cinemas, Ulta Beauty, Amazon-owned Whole Foods Market, and Starbucks. In total, nearly 100 stores are expected to start accepting bitcoin and the other cryptocurrencies via the Spedn app by the end of this year.
This is a huge deal for early adopters and a bigger deal for retailers who will be using it. Why? For one, cryptocurrency transactions are permanent. So this removes chargeback disputes that the retailer has to worry about.
Consulting firm Javelin Strategy estimates that chargebacks cost merchants $31 billion in 2017.
Crypto will also upend the fees of the existing payment industry. To give an idea of what’s at stake, $5.93 trillion in traditional credit card payments resulted in $88.39 billion in fees in the U.S. alone, according to a 2017 Nilson report. Average interchange fees in 2017 ranged between $0.22 and $0.52 depending on the transaction value and the percent fee. A larger transaction could end up costing significantly more. With crypto… it’s currently around $0.04 USD. As new technologies like the Lightning Network, Liquid Sidechain, etc. these could go even lower.
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