My favorite Cryptocurrency, How Can We Get Businesses to Accept it as Payment?

About my Crypto Journey

My crypto journey started more recently, in 2018. Actually, it is now a shared business between my partner and me. My boyfriend and I participated in a session about cryptocurrency at the university that conducted by a friend and we learned the fundamentals of crypto from there. In the beginning, we did not do any direct investment in crypto until we grab the correct idea about it.

Our journey started with Airdrops. Timely we moved to ICO investments. We have invested in several ICOs. We started learning about trading from youtube and books. In the beginner stage, we just did guesses to see whether we are confident enough to start. After getting enough confidence, we started trading both long term and short term.

We are currently holding ETH, BTC, Link, BNB and STEEM. And due to the instability of the current market, rest have converted to USDT as preparation of repurchasing at lower prices. I have directly invested in ETH, and STEEM while my partner investing in other currencies. The biggest potion is STEEM! Which means my favorite is STEEM.

_{Current Holdings}

In Sri Lanka, we faced many issues when entering crypto. Many exchanges have added Sri Lanka to the restricted list due to no government support. It is a big disadvantage we are facing in the crypto economy. So far I have not done any crypto payment for purchase goods due to this reason.

The trading platform we use is Binance. We have used HitBTC early, but due to the high fees, we moved to Binance. We usually purchase other currencies using USDT. We do the transaction with USDT because the zero-fee transaction via the TRON network gives us the advantage in Binance.

Difficulties Met So Far

The major issue we met is that many platforms including CEX, Bittrex and most of ICO investments are restricted for Sri Lanka. The government or the central bank has not given any permission to any organization to operate schemes involving cryptocurrencies plus ICOs. Here comes the major barrier when accepting cryptocurrency in business.

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How can we get businesses to accept the cryptocurrency as payment?

Government Support

Recently many of well-known businesses have started accepting cryptocurrencies specially BTC. Ex: Namecheap, Whole Foods, NewEgg, Domino’s Pizza, Shopify even BMW ^Reference

^{Pexpeppers.co}

But when considering my local context, government barriers are the major reason to limit crypto accept businesses. This matters a lot because of all we purchase crypto but then keep them as a store and sell them at once to convert to fiat currency. But if the government accepts to add crypto payments as a payment method everyone can take the maximum advantage of it.

Allowing Less Transaction Fees

When the customer purchase goods more frequently, the transaction fees become a major issue. Here comes the TRON like networks which provide fast and low free transaction that gives many advantages when applying for cryptocurrency payment in business. When talking in the context of STEEM we have no transaction fee between two accounts so it is very suitable to add as a payment option as I feel.

Address the Problems of Negative Value Fluctuations

When the business accepts a particular cryptocurrency, they still have a risk of reducing the price of the currency. Crypto is volatile in nature, so this becomes an obvious issue. Here comes the value of stable coins like SBD and BUSD, USDT. Let's say a particular seller sold a good for STEEM payment. He can convert STEEM into SBD and hold because the price of SBD doesn't fluctuate far away from 1$. In addition, even the seller receive other cryptocurrency payment, he can exchange them to SBD and hold. Also, he can get an interest.

^{Amazon gift cards with Bitcoin}

It is interesting to see STEEM in Amazon Gift Cards currency list :)

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Wrap Up

According to my understanding, to get businesses to accept the cryptocurrency as payment the particular currency should be reliable, should satisfy revenue demand of the business and should be less cost in transaction fees. Throught the article STEEM came in to my mind as an example. :)

Thank you!

As a reply for : Challenge #1: My favorite Cryptocurrency, how can we get businesses to accept it as payment?

cc: @steemcurator01 , @steemcurator02