While the world remembers how thousands of Bitcoin were used to purchase a pizza back in the “old days”, retailers around the world were not, on average, very keen to accept Bitcoin as payment. This “fear” of accepting a cryptocurrency instead of fiat money hindered the widespread adoption of the “people’s currency” from being accepted as a universal form of payment.
Things are changing, however. A new payment system called Flexa is launching on May 13th, 2019 that will allow users to spend their cryptocurrencies in physical stores. Flexa is actually a payments startup. The project is also supported by the famous Winklevoss-owned crypto firm – Gemini. As reported by Fortune, this is how the payment system would work:
It works by piggy-backing on the digital scanners that many big retailers use to accept phone-based payments from their apps and from digital wallets like Apple Pay…
The payment system now support cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin, bitcoin cash, ether, the gemini dollar and it will work with retailers such as Nordstrom, GameStop, Jamba Juice, Caribou Coffee and Whole Foods among others. The ultimate goal of the startup is to enable all type of cryptocurrencies to be accepted by any type of merchant.
The app that will allow customers to pay for goods with Flexa is called Spedn. The app generates a QR code that customers can scan at the checkout register. Upon scanning, the retailer receives payment in USD, while the equivalent amount of alt coins are withdrawn from the crypto wallet in the app.
While this process may seem easy and quick for customers and merchants, the “interface” behind the app is quite complicated. Flexa actually uses its own digital coin, the FlexaCoin, to secure each and every transaction before it’s approved by the originating coin’s network. Essentially, the payment protocol of Flexa serves as an intermediary for each transaction.