Bakkt offers Starbucks Payments! Bakkt offers Starbucks payments as their first “launch partner” affiliation. Through Bakkt, you can eventually start paying with Bitcoin payments to the coffee giant!
“Over the last year, we’ve assembled a strong team of payments engineers and are nearing completion of our core payments and compliance platform. We’re now focused on the development of the consumer app and merchant portal, as well as testing with our first launch partner, Starbucks, which we expect in the first half of next year.”
Mike Blandina, Chief Product Officer of Bakkt, described the holistic payments system, outlining how an ordinary individual would have an account for buying, selling, and trading Bitcoin – all through an app in which they can make payments as well.
Digging deeper, the idea would be that Bakkt would act as the payment platform itself – individuals sending bitcoin from their account with Bakkt to merchants who also would have an account with Bakkt.
“We’ll be launching a consumer app to make it easy for consumers to discover and unlock the value of digital assets, as well as ways in which they can transact or track them. Merchants gain access to a broader set of customers with expanded spending power,” Bakkt has said.
The chairman of Starbucks hinted at Bitcoin payments to come last year – this is now confirmation of a partnership with the Intercontinental Exchange’s brainchild and the largest coffee chain in the world. Whether this partnership will extend to other accept other cryptocurrencies or not is not yet clear – but it is interesting that they referred to cryptocurrencies as “digital assets” rather than just specifying Bitcoin – this could mean that Ether and other cryptos like Tether might still be in play.
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