Online Retailers Are Rushing Into Crypto: Start Of A Mass Adoption?

The real world crypto adoption is booming, as many new announcements show. Despite the fact that Bitcoin (BTC) is still struggling in the $8,000 region and altcoins are following the lazy moves, the latest cryptocurrency news feature analysts saying that online retailers are making the move towards global adoption of crypto.

It all started earlier this month when Crypto.com made their Pay Checkout plugin available for WooCommerce merchants. According to the reports on the website, the plugin on WooCommerce can cover up about 30% of the world’s online stores.

Meanwhile, the payments and privacy coin Dash (DASH) also announced partnerships with a number of payment providers and online retailers that have millions of users. One of them was Overstock.com.

Some of France’s largest online retailers are also planning to accept Bitcoin in 2020, and the recent Bitcoin news showed that you can officially buy BTC from a 7-Eleven store in the Phillippines. Iceland is also moving up the ladder as one firm just settled a payment from IKEA using the Ethereum blockchain.

All of this suggests that online retailers see crypto as a big thing – and a break that could allow them to prosper in a different way. However, the reality is that crypto retail is still in its early stages.

According to an April 2019 research paper written by Nicole Jonker of the De Nederlandsche Bank in Amsterdam, we should not get ahead of ourselves and online retailers should be careful accepting payments like these. “Acceptance of crypto-payments [by online retailers] is modest,” she wrote. Only 2% of the 768 online retailers in Netherlands accepted payments in crypto.

In the midst of an ongoing adoption, some analysts took to Facebook’s upcoming stablecoin and were featured in the Libra coin news for stating that this coin could be the key to adoption. As Jonker’s report concludes:

“But there is substantial interest among online retailers to adopt them, and acceptance may rise once certain (perceived) barriers are lowered.”

According to Eric Anziano who is the COO of Crypto.com, Libra has played a huge role in increasing customer adoption.

“It was a high-profile announcement that, along with [a] partnership with retailers like Lyft and Uber, drew the attention of retailers who were “not sure” previously,” he noted. “While Libra has faced significant concerns from regulators, it has helped draw more attention to crypto as a viable payments alternative for consumers and e-commerce merchants.”