Chipotle Adds Crypto Payment Acceptance Nationwide

Chipotle is going all in on cryptocurrencies.

Pure-digital payments network Flexa announced in a Wednesday (June 1) Medium post that the fast-casual chain, which has more than 3,000 restaurants across five countries (and over 2,975 in the United States), has begun accepting digital currency payments at all U.S. locations exclusively through the company’s network.

While restaurant brands have made some forays into cryptocurrency acceptance, this move stands out for the wide scale at which the fast-casual chain has integrated the technology. Consumers pay for their Chipotle order through a Flexa-enabled app and scan their phones in the restaurant. Granted, this system, in which consumers pay at the store, leaves out one of Chipotle’s most popular ordering channels: delivery.

“All of us here at Flexa are incredibly excited to be working alongside the Chipotle team to help further digital payments innovation and make real, healthy food even easier to enjoy,” the payments network wrote in the post. “We’re looking forward to continuing to enable more payment options together very soon.”

By the Numbers

In February and March, PYMNTS conducted a study in collaboration with BitPay called “The U.S. Crypto Consumer: Cryptocurrency Use in Online and in-Store Purchases,” which drew from a census-balanced survey of more than 2,330 U.S. consumers who are current or former cryptocurrency users and cryptocurrency nonusers. The study found that nearly a quarter (23%) owned cryptocurrency in 2021.

Get the study: Cryptocurrency Use in Online and in-Store Purchases

Additionally, according to data from PYMNTS April study “The U.S. Crypto Consumer,” also created in collaboration with BitPay, almost eight in 10 crypto-consumers have used bitcoin to shop online or in-store.

What Insiders Are Saying

As cryptocurrency payments become accepted by a greater number of merchants, consumer demand to pay with their digital currencies is increasing.

“The more places that you can spend crypto, the more reasons people have to spend crypto,” BitPay CEO Stephen Pair told PYMNTS’ Karen Webster in a May interview. “And we’re seeing a huge amount of interest among merchants. What’s going on now is merchants are going to their existing payment processors and asking them to support crypto.”

Read more: More Consumers Buying Crypto and Want More Ways to Spend It

Some argue the rise of cryptocurrencies could even change the role of the U.S. dollar domestically and around the world.

“In a sense, [cryptocurrencies] are taking away some transactions that used to be mediated all through the U.S. dollar,” Will Cong, the Rudd Family professor of management and associate professor of finance at the Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University, told PYMNTS in a January interview. “They also challenge currencies that are not super dominant, for example, [the] Canadian and Australian dollar. In addition to that direct challenge, the fact that they reduce the dominance of [the] U.S. dollar is going to cause the competition from [the] U.S. dollar on these other currencies to be reduced.”

See more: Cryptocurrencies May Reduce the Competition From US Dollar