BitPay Enables Consumers to Purchase Best Buy Gift Cards With Crypto

Crypto payments technology firm BitPay has added Best Buy gift cards to the range of gift cards that it enables consumers to buy with cryptocurrency.

With these new gift cards, consumers can more easily spend bitcoin (BTC), ethereum (ETH), Litecoin (LTC) and other cryptocurrencies at the electronics retailer, BitPay said Friday (Aug. 19) in a tweet.

Best Buy joins the hundreds of brands for which BitPay enables consumers to buy gift cards with crypto, according to the gift card page on the BitPay website. Fifteen different cryptocurrencies can be used to buy gift cards on the page.

In practice, consumers download the BitPay app or get the Chrome extension, choose a gift card, choose an amount and pay for the card with their preferred wallet and cryptocurrency. They then receive the gift card instantly, per the site.

PYMNTS research has found that 16.1 million U.S. consumers have used cryptocurrencies to make online purchases in the last 30 days, and 7.1 million have used it to make in-store purchases in that time.

See: The U.S. Crypto Consumer: Cryptocurrency Use In Online and In-Store Purchases

What’s more, among the consumers who have used crypto to make purchases, 9.0% have used cryptocurrency-funded gift cards online and 9.1% have done so in-store, according to “The U.S. Crypto Consumer,” a PYMNTS and BitPay collaboration.

Despite an uncertain economy and a 65% decline in bitcoin’s price, “we have seen a pretty significant increase in spending patterns for high-ticket luxury items,” BitPay Chief Financial Officer Jagruti Solanki told PYMNTS in an interview posted Monday (Aug. 15).

Read more: Savvy Retailers Demand Sophisticated Answers to Evolving Crypto Questions

“Those continue to be popular,” Solanki said, “and there are customers out there who are looking to pay in crypto for those high-ticket items.”

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