Buying Groceries With Cryptocurrencies Becomes a Reality
In an attempt to bring cryptocurrencies into the mainstream, a crypto enthusiast entrepreneur (or a team) have come up with an innovative idea to blend two passions; virtual currencies and nutrition, by enabling grocery shopping using cryptocurrencies, known as CoinGrocer.
The ardent anonymous team launched a beta version of an e-commerce website that allows online consumers to buy more than 21,000 healthy and organically grown groceries with virtual currencies. The site partnered with GloBee, a global payments provider, to receive payment in top cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin, bitcoin cash, ether, litecoin, and monero.
CoinGrocer: An Online Marketplace Accepting Only Cryptocurrencies
On June 1, CoinGrocer, a budding online store with a marketplace of 21,000+ organic, natural, gourmet and beauty products, announced its pro-crypto initiative on Twitter.
The motivation for the initiative, namely CoinGrocer, came from an anonymous group of bitcoin enthusiast who yearns to buy all sorts of day-to-day products with cryptocurrency. Though it was not possible earlier; creators came out with an online store accepting cryptocurrency as a mode of payment for daily essential products.
In a conversion with crypto.news, Felix Honigwachs, CEO of GloBee, said, “This partnership enables the direct linkage between fresh organic groceries and our innovative GloBee payment gateway. Groceries are tangible goods that individuals, families or businesses like restaurants need daily. By using GloBee, shoppers of Coin Grocer have multiple options to use their coins. While some have Bitcoin, we support multiple other coins such as Ethereum, Litecoin or Monero. This marries the ultimate choice in groceries with multiple coin payment options.”
Broader Support for Altcoins in the Near Future
The founders of CoinGrocer are bullish about cryptocurrency, hoping the value of cryptocurrencies to rise instead of dropping. The mission page on the website read:
“Converting our cryptocurrency to purchase groceries proves it just doesn’t have the legitimacy we want it to have. It doesn’t close the loop as a currency if we have to convert it first.”
At present, customers can buy a range of organic products, which includes healthy foods, beauty products, health and home products, with bitcoin, bitcoin cash, ether, litecoin, monero, and Visa for BitPay card holders. Nevertheless, the website owners are also planning to add more cryptocurrencies to their platform and phase out the use of Visa cards. Other emerging cryptocurrencies like Cardano, Dash, Decred, Dogecoin, EOS, IOTA, NEO, Ripple, Stellar and Tron being among their picks.
CoinGrocer Serves the U.S. Market Only, For Now
Unluckily, CoinGrocer, perhaps the first online supermarket accepting cryptocurrency, is only available to the shoppers in 48 states of the USA so far.
Still, there is hope it may expand their services to other countries, or other sellers come forward with such innovative ideas that prove virtual currencies are, indeed, applicable as a real-life payment option.
Do you think more merchants should step-in to accept cryptocurrencies as a payment option? Let us know your thoughts in comments.
