Cryptocurrency debit cards are becoming more prominent as consumers are looking for easy ways to spend their cryptocurrency until mass adoption occurs.

A new Forbes article focused on Wirex and how it was able to gain UK Financial Conduct Authority approval, which is a significant and by no means an easy step. The e-money license will allow Wirex to “operate in 23 countries from the European Union as well as issue personal International Banking Numbers, legal ATM cards, exchange services and hold client funds in segregated accounts instead of company accounts”. Pavel Matveev, one of Wirex founders, said he believes there is room for both cryptocurrencies and the traditional banking framework.

“We don’t think that customers need to choose between the novel crypto world and familiar traditional money; we believe these two ecosystems can and should coexist. At the end of the day, we want to give customers a choice, so people can decide what’s better for their particular problem. Only when people see real benefits, such as cheaper and quicker money transfers or transparent fund tracking, we will reach mass market and mass adoption.”

Wirex plans to integrate the two worlds to allow consumers to easily make purchases via cryptocurrencies with their Wirex card. The article also described how cryptocurrencies can save significant amounts in international purchases and crypto debit cards can further enhance this attribute over traditional banks.

Searching for payment solutions

Wirex is not the only company looking for a cryptocurrency payment solution since Paycent, FuzeX, and PolisPay are some other examples of crypto debit cards. Paycent announced an integration with Dash a few months ago, and FuzeX recently had a signing ceremony with Dash Core Group at Money 20/20. These companies greatly increase liquidity by allowing consumers to make purchases via cryptocurrencies at more locations. However, they are not the only solution since gift card sites also provide a similar, albeit more limited, solution in terms of payment options. Bitrefill and Coincards.ca are just a couple examples of online gift card providers. Bitrefill even has a promotional deal with Dash for 10% off purchases made with Dash.

These are all attempts to mitigate the problem that many merchants still do not directly accept cryptocurrencies as payment. Thus, consumers must rely on middlemen to provide market liquidity and behind-the-scenes exchanges. However, progress is being made as new POS systems are being developed to make it easier for merchants to integrate cryptocurrencies into their current business systems rather than just have a user wallet. Nevertheless, this takes time since cryptocurrencies are still in the early adoption phase. In the meantime, systems like crypto debit cards and gift cards provide a utility bandage to solve a usability gap until cryptocurrency acceptance becomes larger.

Dash strives for direct merchant adoption

Dash provides market-leading technology that makes it very competitive for merchant adoption such as extremely low transaction fees, very fast confirmation times, security, privacy, instant transaction locking with InstantSend, and tax and regulatory compliance assistance. Additionally, Dash is focusing on usability and community outreach to rapidly increasing merchant adoption, which now amounts to almost 4,000 merchants around the world. This helps solve usability gaps by enabling groups to talk with local consumers and merchants how and why they should use Dash, which is important since simply being a great technology is not always enough to increase usage; sometimes individuals have to be shown why they should use a product.