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24% of SMEs plan to accept payments in Bitcoin and other cryptos

More than half of the respondents (59 percent) said that they plan to transition to exclusively accepting only digital payments within two years.

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

Sun, 26 Jun 2022, 15:18 pm UTC

The crypto market has been marked by highly volatile price movements these past six months. The market rally in November last year, which sent Bitcoin (BTC) to a new all-time high of around $69,000 and the total capitalization to $3 trillion, was followed by a series of fluctuations that eroded previous gains and even sent BTC’s price to its current $21,400 or just around a third of its ATH.

However, crypto’s volatility has not dampened interest from small to medium-sized enterprises or SMEs. In fact, a recent study across nine countries such as Brazil, Canada, Germany, Hong Kong, Ireland, Russia, Singapore, United Arab Emirates, and the United States, shows that SME are open to the idea of accepting crypto payments especially Bitcoin.

According to the results the 6th edition of Visa’s Global Back to Business study, 24 percent of small businesses from nine countries that participated in the survey plans to accept crypto payments such as Bitcoin (BTC), the Times of India reported.

More than half of the respondents (59 percent) said that they plan to transition to exclusively accepting only digital payments within two years. The survey was conducted by Wakefield Research and involved 2,250 small businesses with 100 or fewer employees across nine countries.

Accepting crypto such as Bitcoin or Ethereum (ETH) could bring in a range of benefits to businesses. For instance, accepting digital currencies can help attract additional business from crypto enthusiasts. Should businesses plan to hold a portion of these coins instead of converting them to fiat outright, they could profit even more since most of these assets appreciate over time.

It also makes since for businesses to accept crypto payments if they compare transactions fees of major card companies against fees associated when accepting BTC. Credit card transactions cost merchants around 2.9 percent for in-store transactions on overage and 3.5 for online purchases. For comparison, BTC transaction fee is just $1.40 per transaction regardless of amount, making it the more cost-effective option.

“Bitcoin on Lightning is disintermediated, has finality built into it, faster, more secure and is many magnitudes cheaper in transaction cost than credit card’s ~3% fee,” Igneus Terrenus, policy advocate for cryptocurrency exchange Bybit, told Cointelegraph. “The payment does not necessarily need to be settled in BTC since the Bitcoin network can take dollars, convert them to BTC and transfer it across the network and convert it back to dollars upon arrival.”

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