The Intercontinental Exchange’s cryptocurrency venture Bakkt has just announced it’ll launch a crypto ‘consumer app’ next year.
Bakkt’s chief product officer Mike Blandina said the cryptocurrency consumer app will be launched in the first half of 2020 and will let consumers use crypto to buy goods from merchants.
We’ll be launching a consumer app to make it easy for consumers to discover and unlock the value of digital assets, as well as ways in which they can transact or track them. Merchants gain access to a broader set of customers with expanded spending power.
He said the app may not host Bitcoin but will “support a superset of digital assets, including cryptocurrencies as seamlessly as investors transact in stocks in a retail brokerage account.”
Back in 2018, Bakkt did note that they would produce a consumer app and that it would partner up with Starbucks and other companies to provide its customers with a retail experience. Blandina’s blog post on Monday noted Starbucks will be Bakkt’s first partner when the app goes live.
In the blog Balinda also commented: “meaningful opportunities for merchants and consumers to seamlessly interact using digital assets in ways that have not been previously considered.”
There are many crypto merchant services but none have really taken off and gone mainstream. Until you can pay for your rent and groceries with cryptocurrencies the crypto world has some way to go before full acceptance. This is definitely a step closer.
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