AT&T Customers Can Now Pay With Crypto
AT&T has announced that customers can now pay bills with cryptocurrency using BitPay, a crypto payment service, according to reports.
“We’re always looking for ways to improve and expand our services,” said Kevin McDorman, vice president of AT&T Communications Finance Business Operations, in a statement. “We have customers who use cryptocurrency, and we are happy we can offer them a way to pay their bills with the method they prefer.”
BitPay was founded in 2011, and in April of 2018, the company closed a $40 million Series B round.
“We saw the potential for bitcoin to revolutionize the financial industry, making payments faster, more secure, and less expensive on a global scale,” the company said. “We started BitPay because we wanted to make it easy for businesses to accept bitcoin payments. We are currently the largest bitcoin payment processor in the world, serving industry-leading merchants on six continents. We’ve created a seamless, secure bitcoin payment experience used daily by hundreds of thousands of bitcoin users.”
Customers can pay either on AT&T’s website or app, and although AT&T doesn’t specify exactly what cryptocurrencies it will accept, BitPay lists Bitcoin, Gemini USD, Paxos, Circle’s U.S. Dollar Coin and Bitcoin Cash as ones that it works with.
AT&T is not the first major company to accept cryptocurrency. Whole Foods, Gamestop and Nordstrom have all recently said they would now start accepting payments in crypto as well.
Steam, a popular digital distribution platform for video games, started allowing for bitcoin payments in 2016, and it also utilized the services of BitPay. However, Steam stopped allowing it a year later because of what it called “high fees and volatility.”
Pornhub also announced support for cryptocurrency, but said that it only accounted for 1 percent of total payments.
BitPay said it wants to continue expanding.
“Bitcoin’s future looks very bright, and we plan on remaining on the forefront of this technology, creating more tools and services for everyone to use in innovative new ways,” the company said.