Top mobile topup provider Bitrefill has integrated Dash payments into its platform.

Bitrefill previously accepted Bitcoin and Litecoin for customers seeking to top up their prepaid mobile phones with cryptocurrency. With Bitcoin’s decreasing utility as a payments system with high fees and slow transaction times, Dash has been added as a payment option for its usefulness for payments. In order to incentivize Dash usage, Bitrefill has also issued a 10% discount for Dash payments.

Bitrefill’s CEO Sergej Kotliar sees Dash’s integration as a way to promote use in communities with banking issues:

“We service underbanked communities around the world, and Dash’s InstantSend transactions and low fees will further help these communities. We look forward to working with the Dash community to make paying for prepaid mobile phones more affordable and efficient.”

Recently, Dash integrated into Piiko mobile topup platform, which similarly provides mobile refills to prepaid providers all over the world. Piiko suspended Bitcoin payments due to network congestion, making Dash a natural fit.

Dash increasingly moving into the commercial scene

Dash has increasingly taken over for commercial use, picking up merchants where currencies like Bitcoin once dominated. Dash Core’s Director of Business Solutions Bradley Zastrow believes this is because of Dash’s superior functionality as a payment system:

“Dash’s ability to transact at near Visa like speeds with our InstantSend feature, as well as enable double-spend protected transactions, make it ideal for commerce partners like Bitrefill. We offer a solution that eliminates fraud while also providing an extremely fast form of payment, critical to the user experience. As a bonus, Dash will soon be offering a 10% discount when buying either phone or Steam vouchers using Dash through Bitrefill’s platform.”

Worthy of note is Steam’s famed recent dropping of Bitcoin as a payments system due to high fees, high price volatility, and long confirmation times. Dash has been added to Bitrefill because it has few of those drawbacks, and disenfranchised cryptocurrency fan users of Steam will now still be able to spend digital currency on the platform thanks to Dash, at a 10% discount.

Dash’s 2018 adoption sprint

Dash is coiled for a fast-paced year of wide adoption ahead of the release of the initial stages of the Evolution platform. A merchant platform based in Ukraine recently expanded to the UK, expecting to add well over 1,000 Dash-accepting merchants this year. Venezuela has had an adoption surge, with over 2,200 conference attendees and over 80 new merchants onboarded since last summer. In January of 2018 alone, Dash has had over 20 integrations and partnerships, at a rate of five per week, or three integrations for week (12 for the whole month). If this pace is an indicator of the rest of the year, Dash will see wide use in 2018.