Cash, card, or bitcoin? How about bitcoin card?
The bitcoin payment card from Xapo, which will resemble other payment cards in form and function, is set to launch at the end of June, according to the company.
A wrench in adoption could be the card-processing fees the card will be subject to. The objection would not be so much practical as ideological — the idea behind Bitcoin is to remove middlemen and the fees they charge. Merchants will shoulder the fees. Users will pay no processing fees, as with traditional cards.
News of the card broke in April, and cryptocurrency enthusiasts hailed the card as a new, convenient way to spend bitcoins. Unlike previous bitcoin cards, the Xapo card debits funds directly from the user’s bitcoin wallet, which makes for as seamless an experience as traditional payment cards. Xapo, a bitcoin wallet startup, received $20 million from Benchmark, Fortress Investment and Ribbit Capital to support the launch.
The card will have a magstripe and cost $15. Bitstamp will convert the bitcoins from the users’ wallets to dollars for the merchants’ bank account. There is no word yet on EMV Xapo cards.
Xapo began as a secure bitcoin wallet, with insured deposits. Critics have questioned how much insurance the company holds and the company hes yet to reveal this, but insured deposits plus a debit card seem to make for an awfully banklike product.
Xapo’s founder, Wences Casares, founded Lemon Wallet, sold to LifeLock for $43 million in 2013 and more recently shuttered due to security concerns. LifeLock issued a statement saying that “certain aspects of the Lemon Wallet … are not fully compliant with applicable payment card industry (PCI) security standards.”
The appeal of Xapo to bitcoin users is clear — the card makes bitcoins easier to spend. Merchants, depending on who Xapo’s yet-to-be-announced card partner is may not even be aware they are participating in a bitcoin payment. But merchants will also pay processing fees for accepting cards, which would hardly show them the value of bitcoins versus dollars.
Jeremy Almond, CEO of PayStand, the bitcoin-friendly payment processor, told Bank Innovation that the main appeal of bitcoins for merchants is to avoid costly fees from the card companies. Xapo fails this test, but it succeeds elsewhere.
For better or worse, cards, particularly debit cards, have a chokehold on payments, particularly digital payments. Xapo’s move could be considered a step backward for Bitcoin, because if the only way bitcoins get used in commerce is with Visa or Mastercard attached to it, that will be a failure. But at the same time, emulating a card is a clever way of bringing an alternate from of payment into the mainstream, and could widen adoption among users that couldn’t see how they would spend bitcoins even if they had them.