Amazon Owned Whole Foods, Other Big Retailers Start Accepting Bitcoin

Whole Foods, which is owned and operated by the e-commerce giant Amazon and other big retailers are now going to accept payments in bitcoin.

Whole Foods and Others accepting Bitcoin using Spedn:

A company called Flexa in collaboration with Gemini exchange which is owned by the Winklevoss Twins has managed to persuade a lot of big retailers including Nordstrom, Crate and Barrel & Whole Foods to configure the same scanners that they are already using for payments from other digital wallets like Apple Pay to work with their cryptocurrency payments app called Spedn.

Everything is handled on the backend of the application so that the cashier need not even have heard of bitcoin, let alone understand how to manage payment in cryptocurrency. The merchant has the choice in receiving immediately converted fiat or actually taking and holding the cryptocurrency.

The Spedn app lets consumers pay in bitcoin, bitcoin cash, ethereum and GUSD (Gemini Dollar), the Gemini backed stablecoin.

This new solution actually uses the existing systems and offers really only upsides for the companies as they don’t have to do any special training for their staff and there is no new hardware required and just a software upgrade.

It is worth noting that this is still in its early experimental stages for all the retailers which are cooperating with this scheme and things may of course change in the future. The thing to keep in mind here is that Bakkt is likely launching a massive payment processing service for cryptocurrency in the very near future as well and it could be a big competitor to what Gemini and Flexa are offering.

The company will also need to prove itself with consumers and get people to actually go out, download and use the Spedn app.

Can this be a game changer in retailer adoption of bitcoin and cryptocurrencies? Let us know about your thoughts in the comments section below.