On Feb. 15, the Dallas-based mobile gifting company Swych announced it will be accepting cryptocurrencies for payments. Starting next week, instead of using traditional payment processors, Swych users will be able to pay using decentralized digital assets such as BCH, LTC, ETH, BTC, and ETC.
Also Read: Bitcoin’s Social Contract Must Be Resilient to the Whims of Future Generations
Swych Mobile Gifting App to Add Support for 5 Cryptocurrencies
The popular mobile application Swych allows people to give virtual gift cards from over 600 well known retailers and if the person receiving the gift doesn’t like the store they can easily swap the virtual funds for another retailer. Swych was founded in 2015 by Deepak Jain and is backed by capital investment from UAE Exchange Group, a global money transfer exchange, and payment solutions provider. The gift cards available stem from retailers such as Toysrus, Old Navy, Macy’s, Nike, Target, Best Buy, Gap, Banana Republic, Sephora, Nordstrom, Amazon, and more. Essentially Swych allows users to purchase and send gift cards similarly to platforms like Egifter and Gyft. However, the mobile application allows people to effortlessly switch gift cards if they don’t appreciate the particular brand originally gifted.
Swych uses payment providers like Apple Pay, Paypal, Amazon Pay, and Google Pay. But according to an announcement on Friday, the company will be accepting five cryptocurrencies next week. Swych users will be able to pay with bitcoin cash (BCH), litecoin (LTC), ethereum (ETH), bitcoin core (BTC), and ethereum classic ETC. Deepak Jain, CEO of Swych, explained during the announcement that gift cards are a de facto choice among consumers and some of the same consumers also want to spend digital currencies.
“We feel we are ahead of the game considering most retailers have not yet chosen to accept crypto payments,” Jain stated. “In keeping with Swych’s mission of providing our consumers with choice and flexibility, we’d like to provide new options based on our customers’ needs — crypto integration is one of the many requests we’ve received.
‘Cryptocurrencies: The Go-to Choice for Consumers’
Jain says Swych is the only application that allows consumers to send gift cards by simply using a mobile phone number. Swych also got into blockchain technology last year and has rolled out a cross border gifting platform that’s built on top of the Stellar network. Jain believes blockchain technology and cryptocurrency solutions will make the digital gifting platforms’ operations become far more efficient. “While digital gifting is undoubtedly an amazing use case for blockchain, so is payments and I think cryptocurrencies are gradually going to become the go-to choice for consumers to make purchases on the internet,” Jain emphasized.
“For crypto holders, this means they can essentially use their crypto holdings for gift cards that are spendable at hundreds of different retail outlets,” Jain conceded. “There’s no doubt that this will be attractive to a large portion of the community, irrespective of whether the market is up or down.”
What do you think about the digital gifting platform Swych accepting cryptocurrencies? Let us know what you think about this subject in the comments section below.
Image credits: Shutterstock, Pixabay, and Swych.
Need to calculate your bitcoin holdings? Check our tools section.
