A new survey by BitBay, a Polish-based cryptocurrency exchange, showed that their customers do not heavily use cryptocurrency currently, but have a desire to spend cryptocurrency.
Of the 2,582 respondents, “over 90 percent of survey respondents were male, more than 50 percent were below the age of 40, and the largest demographic were males between the ages of 31 and 35”.
“Nine out of ten respondents consider digital currency to be a safe means of performing transactions, though the vast majority of respondents have not made a purchase using cryptocurrencies. Only 25 percent made at least one transaction. Of those that used cryptocurrency as a currency, 15 percent bought electronics, three percent bought food, and two percent used it to travel.”
However, despite the lack of spending cryptocurrency, “[o]ver 50 percent of respondents also declared that they would like to be able to pay with cryptocurrencies for automotive services”. Further, “[o]ver 90 percent believe that cryptocurrency payments will become increasingly popular”.
Growing methods to facilitate cryptocurrency spending
A major barrier to cryptocurrency usage is locating merchants that accept cryptocurrency as payments. Nevertheless, some merchants have decided to take the risk to provide cryptocurrency users with good and services. Some have been sites that directly accept cryptocurrency for services such as CheapAir, More Stamps Global, and Travala which sells flights for cryptocurrency along with thousands of local, independent merchants. Others, such as Crypto Emporium, simply serve as a marketplace and facilitator to connect buyers and sellers of goods and services that only prefer cryptocurrency to buy and sell. Then others have been gift cards, such as Bitrefill or eGifter that provider the temporary liquidity necessary for consumer to indirectly make purchases at big name merchants without them having to directly adopt cryptocurrency.
Merchants have then been assisted in learning about cryptocurrency and getting set up to take cryptocurrency by POS device companies. These POS companies help bridge the gap between the old payment and accounting record system that merchants are accustomed to and the new one with cryptocurrencies. Companies like AnyPay, Salamantex, pay.live, Spark, QR.CR., and more help make accepting cryptocurrencies easy for merchants and teach them how to use cryptocurrency at their shop.
Dash pushing real world adoption
Thanks to Dash’s decentralized treasury, the network can fund individuals and groups to travel to different merchants and convince them to start using cryptocurrency and Dash specifically. A great example is AnyPay, which is funded to not only talk to merchants about adoption, but also to run programs like DashBack, which incentivizes people to use Dash since both the spender and merchant gets some Dash back as a discount.
Overall, Dash helps stand out among merchants and spenders as ideal for using as money thanks to its incredibly low fees (currently around 0.0005 USD) and its incredibly fast transaction time (now less than two seconds with automatic InstantSend for no additional cost). These features make Dash comparable, if not better, than simply using cash in the store.
